There is what a week ago would have been counterintuitive, but now that the recovery process has began is likely to become an truly unnecessary PR disaster for Harmony with an apparently simple solution.
That is relating to the user assets still stuck on the bridges and how this issue is just beginning to spiral from one of the more minor negative user outcomes, to one that compounds negatively as users who want to participate in the recovery effort collectively have up to roughly $800,000 sitting there completely illiquid on Harmony. With no option to redeem those assets and swap back over to ONE, and then use that ONE to buy the affected 1assets stolen by the hack to join the effort in helping to repeg.
Also as mentioned before the PR issue here, and how being left out is going to make it difficult to retain this significant portion of the user base is actually just one facet of the problem here. Many of these assets are the type bridged over in good faith by people in cross-chain communities. Utility tokens like Chainlink, various Gamefi communities, competitors like Polygon, potential future partners like Uniswap(for V3) et cetera. You can imagine what kind of unjust accusations and such are needlessly spread through the cryptosphere, which is painful considering we know here Harmony is a victim just as much as they are. And how up until a point, every reasonable user here who has been paying attention understands and respects the difficult position you were in with investigations and security in the post-hack era prior to the recovery era.
So I would ask if there is any reason that some quick effective action like moving the remaining “dust” from the stolen assets out, some slight modifications of the front end to inform users of the situation and disable them attempting to redeem unbacked assets(back end users should understand if they try and fail), and simply reopening the bridge at least temporarily(even if just for redemptions so people can buy ONE or help repeg and not get let behind) until the trustless version of Horizon is deployed, is something we can’t see prioritized to put out this fire now before it gets worse?
Personally I would be thrilled with any technical solution such as Harmony facilitating some cross-chain swaps for native ONE on Harmony while the BSC/ETH assets get swapped to their respective ONE representation, which then gets burned and we can all move forward. Or bringing liquidity back so we can just swap the backed and secured assets for ONE ourselves at the proper market rate. Perhaps this is more complex than simply allowing redemptions, but if something is blocking that please consider providing alternatives which result in a similar outcome where the full value is available in ONE in a very timely manner as the speed at which the restoration effort and ONE’s revival seems to be taking place is going to unavoidably result in some resentment sadly if users are explicitly left out like this.
Simply waiting for the trustless bridge, as fantastic as we all hope it will be, does not seem to be an option that mitigates any of the serious issues unfolding currently. As I believe I have illustrated the time sensitive nature of the situation amplified by the beginning of the restoration effort, which I personally have been extremely excited about and working on and hoping to contribute to, but quickly realized how minor problems like this can reverberate and derail even the best efforts and intentions.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
