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Polygon proposal would hard-fork to return 70.49M blocked POL to Polymarket and Binance

The plan would move about $6.5M of POL out of five attacker addresses without their keys. It has not been approved, and it has no activation block or client release yet.

November 4, 2026 · Announced · Verified 2026-11-07 via official announcement

A proposal posted on Polygon's governance forum on 4 November 2026 asks for a hard fork that would zero the native POL balances of five attacker-controlled addresses and credit the same amounts to recovery wallets chosen by Polymarket and Binance. The addresses hold about 70.49M POL, indicatively $6.5M at the 29 October price of $0.092 per token. It was scheduled to be presented on the Polygon Protocol Governance Call on 5 November at 14:30 UTC; DexSheet found no published outcome as of 6 November.

About 23.86M POL sits in four addresses from Polymarket's 29 October incident and about 46.63M POL in one address from the Binance hack. Polygon's block producers already blocked these addresses at the victims' request. That stops the funds moving but gives no way to return them, the proposal says, and the attacker has offered validators cash to unblock a transaction. Only native POL is covered and total supply would not change. About 28M POL was involved in the Polymarket incident, of which about 24M sits in the four addresses. The Binance address also received about 6.19M USDT, which Tether has frozen and which is outside the proposal.

The fork would not pay individual users. The funds would go to wallets controlled by the two companies, each of which must first prove control of its address. Polymarket said on 30 October that it was already refunding affected wallets, and Binance says it replaced stolen assets with company funds, and the proposal does not make those repayments depend on the vote. The proposal names Polymarket and Binance as its proposers; crypto.news reports it was posted by a member of the Polygon Labs validator support team.

Nothing is live. The forum thread showed no vote when DexSheet checked it on 5 November. Rechecked on 6 November, the proposal still lists the fork name, activation block and client release as undecided. The 5 November call agenda listed the proposal, but no call notes or vote result had been posted on the forum by 7 November. Of three forum replies, one backs the plan, one warns that reassigning native POL could invite future law-enforcement requests, and one asks for a published address list for integrators. Activation needs approval through Polygon governance, and the engineering design still needs confirmation. The proposal calls about two weeks after approval workable for client work and a testnet rehearsal. Nodes that do not upgrade would split onto a different chain at the fork block. The proposal calls this "an extreme action" and rejects a standing freeze-and-recover power because it would give permanent power over user funds.

“It is an extreme action that should not be reproduced commonly.”

— Polygon governance proposal, 4 November 2026

Who this affects

POL holders, Polygon node operators and block explorers, plus Polymarket and Binance as recipients. Users of either platform receive nothing directly from the fork.

Polymarket at a glance

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