Harmony Protocol announced on Wednesday a reimbursement plan for wallets affected by the US$100 million hack on its Horizon cross-chain bridge last month, which was met by mostly negative feedback.

See related article: North Korea said to be responsible for Harmony Horizon hack

Fast facts

  • The reimbursement will be with Harmony’s ONE cryptocurrency, distributed monthly over a three-year period. Harmony explained that immediate compensation is difficult due to the constraints on its treasury. 
  • The proposal requires a hard fork of the Harmony blockchain for increasing the supply of ONE tokens, Harmony wrote in its announcement to the community.
  • Harmony gave two options for compensation, one is an estimated 100% reimbursement with a minting of 4.97 billion ONE tokens, while the second option is to mint 2.48 billion ONE tokens for an estimated 50% reimbursement.
  • Harmony Protocol says it will proceed with the plan after taking community feedback into consideration — a snapshot vote will be taken from Aug. 1 to Aug. 15.
  • The reception from the community is overwhelmingly negative — “Minting more ONE? already the supply is too high, increasing more will further hurt the tokenomics,” one Harmony community user commented.
  • Harmony Protocol wrote that its decision to increase supply of ONE for reimbursement is to preserve the foundation treasury which will be used to support the Harmony ecosystem in the long term.
  • Last month, blockchain analytics firm Elliptic claimed that North Korea’s state-backed hacker group Lazarus was behind the attack on Harmony’s Horizon bridge.

See related article: Are we helpless against attacks on blockchain bridges?