Polygon Weighs Hard Fork to Claw Back $6.8M in Stolen POL

Binance and Polymarket are asking Polygon to rewrite the chain's recent history. In a Wednesday governance proposal, the two platforms pitched a hard fork that would strip about 70.49 million POL, worth roughly $6.8 million, out of five attacker-controlled addresses and send it to recovery wallets they control.

The math splits cleanly. Four addresses tied to the Polymarket hack hold 23.86 million POL, about $2.31 million. A single address linked to the Binance hack holds 46.63 million POL, roughly $4.51 million. The fork would execute at a predetermined block, and per the proposal, POL's total supply would not change.

Polygon's block producers already moved fast, blocking transactions from the compromised addresses so the stolen tokens can't move. But that's a tourniquet, not a cure. The proposal describes the restrictions as temporary measures that can't put the funds back in their owners' hands.

There's a process before any fork goes live. The plan needs governance approval and testing on Polygon's Amoy testnet, with discussion scheduled for Nov. 5. No mainnet activation date has been confirmed.

The push follows a brutal stretch for both platforms. Binance disclosed a record $6.3 billion hack on Oct. 29, and Polymarket briefly halted trading after reporting that a third-party provider had been compromised.

For now, the stolen POL sits frozen and visible on-chain, waiting on a vote that would decide whether Polygon bends its own ledger to give it back.