Polygon Proposes Hard Fork to Recover 70.5 Million Stolen POL Tokens
A governance proposal seeks a hard fork to retrieve funds from two recent hacks.
1Governance Proposal for Recovery
A member of the Polygon Labs Validator Support Team has introduced a proposal for a hard fork on the Polygon PoS mainnet. This initiative aims to recover approximately 70.49 million POL tokens stolen during security incidents on October 29 and 30, 2026, involving the platforms Polymarket and Binance.
2Scope of the Incident
The stolen assets include roughly 23.86 million POL linked to the Polymarket breach and 46.63 million POL associated with the Binance incident. While block producers have successfully restricted these funds from moving across the blockchain, the current block list mechanism is considered a temporary stopgap rather than a permanent solution.
3Technical Limitations of Blocking
Current restrictions require Bor transaction block lists, which necessitate network restarts or span rotations to update. This process is inefficient and leaves potential vulnerabilities, as it does not cover every transaction path. Furthermore, the attacker reportedly attempted to bribe validators with cash payments to bypass these existing security restrictions.
4Proposed Recovery Mechanism
The hard fork would set the balances of five attacker-controlled addresses to zero and credit the equivalent amounts to verified recovery wallets. This coordinated transfer is scheduled to occur at a specific, fixed block height. Both Polymarket and Binance must provide written proof of authorization to receive these recovered funds.
5Governance and Development Timeline
The proposal is slated for discussion during the Polygon Protocol Governance Call on November 5. If approved, developers estimate that client development and testnet rehearsals on the Amoy network will require two to three weeks. The plan explicitly guarantees that the total supply of POL tokens will remain fixed throughout.
6Exclusions and Asset Scope
This recovery effort is strictly limited to the native POL tokens held at the five identified malicious addresses. Other stolen assets, such as USDT taken from Binance, are excluded from this specific hard fork, as Tether has already taken independent measures to freeze those particular funds on their own network.
7Precedent and Network Integrity
Polygon emphasizes that this hard fork represents an extreme measure and should not be viewed as a standard practice for fund recovery. The network aims to avoid establishing a general mechanism for freezing user assets, maintaining that this intervention is a unique response to the specific security breaches identified.
8Future Implications for Decentralization
The situation raises critical questions regarding the extent to which decentralized networks should intervene to reverse malicious transactions. As cyberattacks become more frequent, the community must balance the need for asset recovery with the core principles of blockchain immutability, ensuring that such interventions do not compromise the network's long-term decentralization.
Original article: DailyCoin — Polygon Proposes Hard Fork to Recover 70.5 Million Stolen POL Tokens