- Polygon is considering a hard fork to move 70.49 million POL out of five attacker-controlled addresses.
- Binance and Polymarket must verify ownership of their recovery wallets before the proposed hard fork.
- Total POL supply would stay the same, and no mainnet activation block has been set yet.
Polygon may rewrite part of its own ledger to return stolen funds. A proposal published on November 4 calls for a coordinated hard fork of the Polygon Proof-of-Stake network to recover about 70.49 million POL worth roughly $6.5 million.
Polygon Plans Hard Fork to Recover $6.5M in Stolen POL
Parvez03, a member of the Polygon Labs Validator Support Team, wrote the proposal. It targets five addresses tied to security incidents at Polymarket and Binance.
Four of them are linked to Polymarket and hold about 23.86 million POL. The fifth is linked to Binance and holds about 46.63 million POL.
At a set activation block, upgraded nodes would reset those balances to zero and send the same amounts to recovery wallets that the two companies control. No new tokens would be minted, so total POL supply wouldn’t change.
Validators have already frozen the addresses with the Bor transaction block list. The list stops the attacker from moving the funds, but it can’t send them back to their owners. The proposal also calls the list fragile, since every change needs a restart and entries never expire.
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Why Polygon Validators Want to Recover 70.49M POL
The proposal calls the fork an “extreme action” that should never become routine. It argues that this case meets a narrow set of conditions.
Polymarket and Binance both publicly acknowledged the thefts, and on-chain transactions connect the stolen POL to both companies. Every block producer has already blocked the addresses. The fork would cover only these five addresses and leave all other assets alone.
Before activation, Binance and Polymarket would have to prove they control their recovery wallets. They would also have to confirm in writing that those wallets should receive the funds.
Hard Fork Proposal Could Trigger Chain-Split Risks
Validators who don’t upgrade could keep following the old rules, which could split the chain. The team plans to test the change on the Amoy testnet, notify RPC providers and block explorers, and wait until enough stake has upgraded before going live. Development and testing could take about two weeks after approval.
The bigger debate is about precedent. Blockchains earn trust from the idea that finalized balances stay put. This fork would move POL without the holder’s private key, and some validators may object to that on principle.
The proposal was scheduled for discussion on the Polygon Protocol Governance Call on November 5 at 14:30 UTC. There’s no confirmed mainnet date yet.
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