Polygon weighs hard fork to return 70.49M stolen POL to Binance and Polymarket

Binance and Polymarket are asking Polygon to do something drastic: rewrite the network's software so 70.49 million frozen POL can be lifted out of five attacker wallets and dropped into recovery wallets the two firms control. That means a hard fork. The proposal was drafted by the affected companies and posted on the Polygon Community Forum by Polygon Labs' validator support team on Nov. 4, with validators set to weigh in on the Protocol Governance Call on Nov. 5 at 14:30 UTC.

The mechanics are blunt. At a block number chosen in advance, the new software would sweep every POL token out of the five attacker wallets and credit the same amount to Polymarket's and Binance's recovery addresses. Four of those wallets hold roughly 23.86 million POL left from the Polymarket hack, while the fifth, tied to Binance, carries about 46.63 million POL. At POL's Oct. 29 price of $0.0924, the whole pot comes to about $6.5 million.

The tokens vanished on Oct. 29, when hackers broke into an outside script and hit traders while they were logged in. Polymarket quickly narrowed its international platform to order cancellations only, reopened trading the same day and promised users refunds. Binance's bruising was far deeper — according to Cryptopolitan, the exchange pegged the damage at about $6.3 billion, making it the largest hack in crypto history.

The attacker is not sitting still. The proposal says they keep trying to move the coins, and on Oct. 30 a pending transaction carried a fee of about 219,450 POL, worth roughly $20,000 at the prior day's price. They have also dangled money at validators to push a transaction past the block list. Four block producers added the wallets to that list, but they only check it when their software restarts — meaning a fresh restart is needed every time a new address gets added.

Before any fork fires, Binance and Polymarket must prove in writing that they own the recovery wallets, and their incident reports have to stay public and line up with what the blockchain shows. The proposal's authors figure about two weeks is enough to build the new software and test it on Polygon's Amoy test network if governance says yes. They also frame the fork as an extreme measure that, in their words, should not be reproduced commonly.