Polygon proposes hard fork to recover 70.49M stolen POL

A proposal posted on the Polygon governance forum on Nov. 4 (about 12:00 PM ET) asks validators to approve a hard fork that would return 70.49 million POL, stolen in the Oct. 29⁠–⁠30 incidents, to Binance and Polymarket. The tokens sit on five attacker addresses that block producers have frozen, but nothing in the current setup can send them back to their owners. The plan has not been approved; it is due to be presented on Polygon's governance call on Nov. 5 at 9:30 AM ET.

Details

According to the proposal text, four addresses tied to the Polymarket incident hold about 23.86M POL, and one address from the Binance hack holds about 46.63M POL. At the Oct. 29 price of $0.0924 per POL, that is roughly $6.5M. Polymarket and Binance are named as the proposers, and Cryptopolitan reports the post came from Polygon Labs' validator support team.

For now the funds are only frozen: block producers added the addresses to a Bor block list. The text calls this a stopgap, since each producer reads the list only at startup, so changes need a restart, and entries never expire. It also says the attacker kept trying: a pending transaction with a fee of about 219,450 POL was seen on Oct. 30, and validators were offered cash to help unblock it. The USDT that left Binance's wallet alongside the POL has already been frozen by Tether.

The fork would, at a set block, zero the native POL balance of each listed address and credit the same amount to a recovery address designated by Polymarket or Binance. Only these addresses and only native POL are covered, and earlier transactions are not reversed. It would be rehearsed first on the Amoy testnet, and both companies must verify they control the recovery addresses. The fork name, activation block and client release are still undecided. The authors call it an extreme step that should not be repeated commonly.

What this means for the market

The precedent is contentious: changing a balance without the holder's signature cuts against the idea that on-chain transactions are final. The authors argue the conditions are met only here: the victims publicly acknowledged the hacks, no one has contested the facts, and the address list is closed. Early forum replies back the plan, but the outcome rests with validators.

If approved, validators would need to update their clients before the activation block. For more on the Polymarket breach, see our incident explainer; the token is on its POL page. Not investment advice.