Harmony proposes blockchain rollback to reverse massive forged token mint

The protocol intends to revert shard 0 to block 92,730,034 and shard 1 to block 94,978,278, effectively wiping the chain history generated after 11:25:37 p.m. UTC on August 11. By deploying replacement databases rather than a standard in-place rewind, developers hope to provide validators with a clean, verified state. This approach bypasses the risks of legacy data corruption, which could have left residual attack vectors or inconsistencies in cross-shard communication.

Discarding these blocks carries significant collateral damage, as more than 109,000 regular transactions and 315 staking operations will be deleted. Harmony’s analysis indicates that approximately 95% of the affected transactions were automated, primarily involving DEX bots and failed scripts. Because the forged tokens have already dispersed into liquidity pools, exchange accounts, and bridges, the team ruled out simple blacklisting or token burning, citing the high probability of impacting innocent users' assets. The network is currently coordinating with law enforcement, exchanges, and third-party security firms to trace the illicit funds and mitigate the fallout from the exploit.