The Harmony Protocol team has sent out an update to its users and partners in regards to a recovery plans from the Horizon Bridge attack that saw a huge $100 million being stolen. The hack took place in June. Harmony’s first response was to mint billions of the native toke called ONE to give to the attack victims.
The Harmony protocol team has released an update to its community and partners concerning its asset-recovery proposition. This proposal aims to preserve Harmony’s blockchain without issuing new tokens after the hack of \$100 million Horizon Bridge in June.
Harmony is a proof-of-stake (EPoS), sharded network that uses a cross-chain model and aims to be the Layer 1 trustless bridge between all chains.
The Horizon Ethereum Bridge was exploited by the hack. This cross-chain bridge allows assets to be moved between the Harmony (and Ethereum) blockchains. The attackers stole USDC, and WBTC assets valued at \$100 million. After that, they swapped all tokens for ETH and proceeded to launder funds.
Harmony offered a bounty of $1 million for the funds to be returned
Harmony offered a 1 million bounty in return for the stolen funds. As part of a plan for reimbursing hack victims, Harmony’s core team proposed a hard fork to create billions new Harmony ONE tokens.
The core team opposed spending the foundation treasury at the time, arguing that the funds were intended for growth and ecosystem planning. This proposal was rejected by the governance forum. The Harmony community expressed concern about the inflationary effects of such a mint. The proposal was then withdrawn.
The Harmony team announced the new proposal today via a Blog post. It stated that it had listened to Harmony’s validators, community and agreed on the goal to “preserve the foundation of Harmony blockchain with zero minting” and proposed to use the foundation Treasury for recovery funds.
“We don’t propose to mint more than ONE tokens or change our tokenomics by hard forking the protocol. Instead, we propose to deploy our treasury towards recovery and development.
Harmony said that it would be providing a more detailed update in the coming days outlining the mechanisms for deploying the recovery funds.
