$4 billion Market Cap Wiped Out: Harmony Suffers Second 50% Attack in a Day, Former Star Public Blockchain Left with Only "A Glimmer of Hope"

August 12, Harmony, a veteran high-performance public chain, experienced another security incident today. On-chain analysis shows that Harmony appears to have been hit by a empty block vulnerability attack, with the attacker unauthorizedly minting around 4 billion ONE tokens, accounting for approximately 26% of the current supply. Subsequently, around 2.8 billion ONE tokens were transferred to a trading platform, causing significant selling pressure in the market. As a result, the price of ONE was cut in half during the day.

The Harmony Protocol team stated that they are collaborating with relevant exchanges to try to stop and freeze the funds involved in this incident, while also developing a solution and assessing rollback options.

In contrast to the expected "major incident," this event actually only caused a $5 million market cap loss for Harmony—before the incident, Harmony's total market cap was only about $17 million (which later dropped to $12.8 million, ranking 1004th in the crypto market).

According to CoinGecko data, ONE had reached a historical high of about $0.379 in October 2021; using the market's common measure at that time, Harmony's peak market cap was around $4 billion (ranking in the top 50 by market cap). Now, based on the $13.7 million market cap, Harmony has shrunk by about 99.7% from its peak, retaining only about 0.34% of its value. Calculated by the five-year composite metric, its market cap has evaporated by about 70% annually; for secondary market investors, the experience may feel like going through multiple rounds of 90% level markdowns, with the possibility of new discount layers after each low point.

This is not Harmony's first major security incident. In June 2022, Harmony's Horizon cross-chain bridge was hacked for about $100 million, and the U.S. FBI later attributed the incident to the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group. That attack severely damaged trust in the Harmony ecosystem and became a significant turning point for the long-term loss of TVL, users, and liquidity.

According to DeFiLlama data, as of the time of writing, Harmony's current DeFi total value locked is only about $171,000, the 24-hour on-chain fees are only $0.13, DEX trading volume is only $694, there are 244 active addresses in the last 24 hours, the stablecoin market cap is about $8.47 million, and the ONE market cap is about $13.7 million.

Records show that Harmony was founded around 2018, driven by a team with a Silicon Valley engineering background including Stephen Tse, focusing on sharding, low costs, fast confirmations, and EVM compatibility. In the early stages, the project raised about $18 million in funding from investors such as Lemniscap, Consensus Capital, BCA Fund, AU21 Capital, UniValues, etc.; in 2019, it raised another $5 million through a Binance Launchpad IEO, becoming one of the star projects in the narrative of "high-performance public chains" at that time.