Polygon validators are being asked to approve a hard fork that would reassign about 70.49 million $POL from five blocked addresses to recovery wallets for Polymarket and Binance.
The Polygon Improvement Proposal, posted Nov. 4, identifies the addresses as attacker-controlled following separate security incidents on Oct. 29-30. The draft awaits approval, with no activation block or client release set.
Polygon PoS block producers already added the addresses to the Bor transaction block list at the affected firms’ request, according to the proposal. That has kept the $POL in place but provides no way to return it. The fork would reassign balances without the holders’ signatures rather than undo earlier transactions.
PolygonScan balances checked around 12:23 p.m. ET on Nov. 4 totaled about 70.49 million native $POL, according to The Defiant’s calculation: 23.86 million across the four Polymarket-linked addresses and 46.63 million in the Binance-linked address. Using CoinGecko’s price around 12:24 p.m. ET, The Defiant calculates an indicative value of $6.8 million.
Polymarket’s post-mortem said a compromised third-party script used active sessions to sell users’ positions and drain wallets on Oct. 29. Binance said in its separate incident report that an attacker exploited unauthorized access to an internal wallet-signing service.
From Blocking Transfers to Reassigning Balances
At the start of a designated block, the draft would read each listed address’s balance from the previous block, reduce it to zero and credit the same amount to the relevant recovery wallet. Only native $POL is covered; other tokens are excluded, and total supply would not change.
The draft lists both recovery wallets but requires each firm to prove control and confirm ownership in writing before activation. The full-balance design still needs confirmation from Bor engineers.
A One-Time Fork, With Precedent Risk
The proposal calls this an “extreme action” that “should not be reproduced commonly.” It rejects a permanent freeze-and-recover power and argues intervention is justified by a publicly acknowledged theft, traceable funds, a request from the victim, blocking by every producer and an amount large enough to warrant a fork.
Before activation, Section 5 requires governance approval, published post-mortems consistent with the onchain record, continued blocking by every producer, and a fresh balance snapshot with any changes published. Nodes that do not upgrade would follow a different chain.
The proposal is scheduled for presentation at Polygon’s Protocol Governance Call on Nov. 5 at 9:30 a.m. ET. The draft views about two weeks after approval as workable for client development and an Amoy testnet rehearsal; it sets no mainnet activation date.
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