Recently, Harmony, a layer one public blockchain that has been operational for nearly seven years, officially proposed to terminate its existing operational model and transition to a layer two solution on Ethereum.

The direct trigger for this significant transition was a major malicious attack that the public blockchain suffered in August.

According to the official statement, this malicious attack was quite severe, associated with "state-level hackers and AI agents," and it was stated that the attack exceeded the defensive limits that Harmony, as a layer one public blockchain, possessed. If the project continued to maintain its existing operational model, the security costs would be untenable, so they decided to completely transition to become Ethereum’s L2, fully relying on Ethereum for security assurances.

The transition from a layer one public blockchain to a layer two on Ethereum is not a new thing in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, especially in the past couple of years. Recently, I shared the example of GNOSIS transitioning from an independent L1 to Ethereum L2.

The transitions involved in those cases were almost all due to the stagnation of their own ecosystems; those projects hoped to transition from L1 to Ethereum's L2 to leverage the liquidity and popularity of the entire Ethereum ecosystem to find new opportunities and business ventures.

However, Harmony's transition is different from those previous cases, in my impression, it is the first to clearly transition due to being overwhelmed by security issues.

I have repeatedly emphasized in my past articles discussing Ethereum's resilience and unique advantages:

The pursuit of ultimate decentralization in operations is Ethereum's unique advantage among smart contract public blockchains. Several years ago, Vitalik conducted hypothetical analyses in various articles, striving to ensure that Ethereum could withstand national-level disruptions and attacks and operate normally.

However, the scenarios envisioned by Vitalik are rarely encountered in real life and almost impossible to practice. Therefore, the significance of this hypothesis has not been recognized by many, and its value is certainly not acknowledged by many.

This is normal. After all, for the vast majority of people, only what they can see will be believed; things that cannot be seen, regardless of how logical they are, will be ignored.

Additionally, I recalled earlier when, after Anthropic’s Mythos discovered a large number of security vulnerabilities, a reader left a comment asking if, in the AI era, Bitcoin and Ethereum would face attacks from AI?

To that question, my response at the time (in essence) was: Bitcoin and Ethereum should be the safest among all these systems.

Moreover, I believe that even if issues arise, they should be able to resolve them quickly.

However, that answer and what I believe are based on logical reasoning, which cannot be confirmed by factual cases.

But this time, Harmony's case happens to cover both aspects mentioned above: the scale of state-level challenges and the challenges posed by AI technology.

As a public blockchain that has been running for nearly seven years, I believe it has certainly experienced numerous attacks in the past. Being able to reach today, it can withstand attacks of general scale and type.

For a relatively “battle-tested” system like this to suffer such a severe attack, the scale and type of the attack must not be simple.

Therefore, to some extent, I believe the team's description of the severity of this attack (“state-level” and “AI Agent”) is fairly credible.

I believe that cases like Harmony will not be the first, nor will they be the last. With the emergence of increasingly powerful AI technology, more and more currently functioning L1 public blockchains will face significant security tests—not only technical challenges but also challenges to resources and economic models.

When facing these tests, what choices should be made?

Harmony has provided the answer: choose Ethereum—this is a recognition and endorsement of Ethereum’s security and resilience from the side.

I believe this choice will also serve as a model for future such cases.

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