Binance and Polymarket ask for a Polygon hard fork to recover $6.8 million

Binance and Polymarket want Polygon to rewrite five balances on its main chain. A proposal posted to the Polygon forum on 4 November asks for a Polygon hard fork that would take about 70.49 million POL, roughly $6.8 million, from addresses the attackers control and credit it to recovery wallets owned by the two companies. Cointelegraph reported the plan on 5 November.

Where the coins sit

The POL came from two separate incidents on 29 and 30 October. Binance lost a record $6.3 billion in its hack, and Polymarket halted trading after a third-party provider was compromised. Part of the loot landed on Polygon PoS:

• 23.86 million POL, about $2.31 million, across four Polymarket-linked addresses;
• 46.63 million POL, about $4.51 million, in one Binance-linked address.

Polygon block producers already put the five addresses on a transaction block list at the victims’ request, so the coins cannot move. The proposal says the list “cannot return the funds to their owners”. Tether has frozen the USDT in the Binance-linked address separately.

How the fork would work

At a fixed activation block, the client would set each address’s balance to zero and credit the same amount to a recovery address. Total POL supply stays the same, and the staking and bridge contracts stay untouched. Binance supplied more addresses, but the fork covers only the five on the list.

The authors set the steps out in order:

• a presentation at the Polygon Protocol Governance Call on 5 November at 14:30 UTC;
• client work and a rehearsal on the Amoy testnet, about two weeks after approval;
• notice to validators, RPC providers and block explorers;
• proof that Binance and Polymarket control the recovery wallets.

The authors have not set a mainnet date.

The precedent problem

The authors accept that the fork sets a risky example: “Moving a user’s balance is the most sensitive action that can occur on a chain.” They reject a standing freeze-and-recover tool because “it would be a permanent power over user funds”, and they call this fork “an extreme action that should not be reproduced commonly”.

Ethereum split over the same question in 2016, when a fork returned DAO funds and the minority kept the old chain as Ethereum Classic. In 2025 Sui validators voted to return about $162 million stolen from the Cetus exchange. The Polygon proposal lists a chain split as a risk if validators fail to upgrade.

What it means for you

If you hold POL, the fork changes no supply and touches only five addresses. It does show that a handful of Polygon block producers can freeze an address within days of a request. The network is also busy with payments work. If you choose a network for large holdings, read who runs its block production and what its governance can do to a balance.

Figures come from the Polygon forum proposal and Cointelegraph. The proposal still needs governance approval and testing before activation.