Harmony to Roll Back Blockchain to Aug. 11, Wiping Over 109,000 Transactions After ONE Exploit
Key Takeaways
- •Harmony's validators will revert to blocks recorded at 11:25 p.m. UTC on Aug. 11 and resume block production from replacement databases.
- •The rollback discards 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions, as selectively restoring them was judged unsafe for chain consistency.
- •Investigators have traced nearly all of the forged ONE to wallets or service boundaries, and Harmony is working with exchanges, bridges and law enforcement.
- •ONE carried a market capitalization of roughly $10.8 million at last look, according to CoinGecko data.
- •Harmony joins Ravencoin in seeking to reverse confirmed transactions after an exploit, a path whose best-known precedent is Ethereum's 2016 DAO hard fork that produced Ethereum Classic.
Harmony plans to roll back its blockchain to Aug. 11 following an exploit that created forged ONE tokens, a decision that will discard more than 109,000 transactions confirmed after the network's chosen checkpoint.
The layer-1 network said Monday that validators would revert to the blocks recorded at 11:25 pm UTC on Aug. 11. New blocks will then be produced from the next heights using replacement databases.
The discarded window includes 109,126 regular transactions and 315 staking transactions. Harmony said selectively restoring transactions was unsafe because balances, contract states, nonces and other conditions would differ on the replacement chain, which would leave it in an inconsistent state. In practice, ordinary transfers and staking operations confirmed during the window will not exist on the replacement chain.
The prospect of a rollback first emerged last week, after reports that unauthorized ONE had been minted and sent to exchanges. On Monday, Harmony said investigators had traced nearly all of the forged ONE to wallets or service boundaries, and that the project was working with exchanges, bridges and law enforcement. At last look, ONE carried a market capitalization of roughly $10.8 million, according to CoinGecko data.
Reversing confirmed transactions cuts against the finality that blockchains are typically prized for, and the best-known precedent left a lasting mark: Ethereum's 2016 hard fork to undo the DAO hack split the network in two, with dissenters carrying on the original chain as Ethereum Classic. Harmony's plan places it alongside Ravencoin among blockchain networks now seeking to reverse already-confirmed activity in the wake of an exploit. Ravencoin faced a potential three-day blockchain reorganization after a consensus flaw was exploited, with mining pools controlling most of the network's hash rate building a competing chain that could reverse previously confirmed transactions. Ravencoin's recent price of $0.002819 reflected a market capitalization of $46.3 million, according to CoinGecko.
For Harmony, the near-term questions are operational: whether validators complete the revert and resume block production from the replacement databases as outlined, and how the exchanges, bridges and law-enforcement agencies working with the project handle the traced funds.
