Polygon Proposal Seeks Hard Fork to Return 70.49M POL Tied to Binance, Polymarket Hacks
A Polygon Labs validator support team member has proposed a coordinated hard fork to return about 70.49 million POL, valued near $6.5 million, to wallets controlled by Binance and Polymarket. The change would move the balances from five blocked addresses without altering POL's total supply, and it is slated for discussion on a November 5 governance call.
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What the Proposal Would Do
A member of the Polygon Labs Validator Support Team, identified as Parvez03, published a Polygon Improvement Proposal on November 4 suggesting a coordinated hard fork of the Polygon Proof-of-Stake mainnet. The change would remove POL from five blocked addresses and credit the same amounts to recovery wallets verified by Binance and Polymarket. The author said no new POL would be created, leaving total supply unchanged, and that transfers would be executed at a predetermined block before other transactions in that block are processed.
The proposal covers roughly 23.86 million POL held across four addresses linked to the Polymarket incident and 46.63 million POL in a single address tied to Binance. The author values the combined balance at about $6.5 million, using POL's October 29 price of $0.0924. The document describes the intervention as an "extreme action that should not be reproduced commonly."
Background on the Two Incidents
The proposal follows two separate security events reported on October 29 and 30. In the Polymarket case, a third-party service provider was compromised and the prediction market temporarily restricted trading before restoring its international platform and saying affected users would be compensated. Approximately 28 million POL was involved in that incident, but the proposal addresses only the balances sitting in four blocked wallets.
Binance reported unauthorized withdrawals across multiple blockchains. According to the proposal, a Binance hot wallet sent about 46.63 million POL and 6.19 million USDT to an attacker-controlled address. Tether subsequently froze the USDT. Binance assessed the breach as affecting assets worth approximately $6.3 billion in total, but the Polygon recovery concerns only the native POL balances identified on-chain.
Current Restrictions and Open Questions
All four Polygon block producers have added the identified addresses to their transaction block lists, which has prevented transfers. The proposal warns that these restrictions cannot return the assets to their owners, because the attacker still controls the private keys. Each block producer currently reads its restriction list at software startup, so any update requires restarts or other operational changes, a limitation the proposal cites as part of the case for a protocol-level fix.
The proposal also alleges further attacker activity. It states that the attacker attempted another transaction on October 30 offering a fee of roughly 219,450 POL, and that the attacker contacted validators offering cash payments to help move the funds. These claims come from the proposal itself and have not been independently verified in the source material. Polygon has not yet adopted the proposal, and it is scheduled for discussion on the Polygon Protocol Governance Call on November 5 before any implementation decision.
Reporting on the figures differs slightly across outlets. The Defiant frames the recovery as 70.49 million POL, while Crypto.news cites the same total and gives a dollar value of about $6.5 million, consistent with the proposal's October 29 price. Both outlets attribute the Binance outflow to the same 46.63 million POL address, and the Polymarket-linked balance of 23.86 million POL is consistent across reports. The gap between the roughly 28 million POL involved in the Polymarket incident and the 23.86 million POL covered by the recovery is explained by the proposal's scope, not by a disagreement over the numbers.
Why It Matters
For Traders
Any decision to reverse the transfers would move roughly 70.49 million POL, so traders with exposure to POL liquidity should track the November 5 governance call for an outcome.
For Investors
A protocol-level reversal of stolen funds would set a precedent on how Polygon handles custody failures, which bears on the network's decentralization and governance credibility over the longer term.
For Builders
Builders on Polygon should note that block producer restriction lists are read at startup, and any hard fork would change finality and transaction-ordering assumptions their applications rely on.
This article is for information only and is not financial advice. Read the full disclaimer.
