A proposal posted on Polygon’s governance forum on 4 Nov asks the network to change its own ledger: a one-off hard fork would empty five blocked attacker addresses holding about 70.49 million POL and credit the tokens to recovery wallets.
The Polygon Improvement Proposal lists Polymarket and Binance as its proposers. Both lost POL in separate incidents on 29 and 30 Oct.
A so-called hard fork is a rule change that every node must adopt at the same block. Nodes that refuse end up on a separate chain.
About 23.86 million POL sits in four addresses linked to the Polymarket drain. A single address holds about 46.63 million POL sent from a Binance hot wallet during the Binance hack.
That Binance address also received about 6.19 million USDT. Tether has frozen it, the proposal says, which leaves native POL as the balance at risk.
Polygon’s four block producers had already added the five addresses to a block list in Bor, the network’s main client. The tokens cannot move, but nothing returns them either.
The proposal is blunt about the stakes. “It is an extreme action that should not be reproduced commonly,” it says.
Why a freeze is not enough
The authors call the block list a stopgap. Each producer reads it only at startup, entries never expire, and it filters only some kinds of transactions.
They say the attacker has kept trying. A pending transaction offering a fee of about 219,450 POL was seen on 30 Oct, and the attacker contacted validators offering cash to get a transaction through, according to the proposal.
At 29 Oct prices, the five balances were worth about $6.5 million, the proposal estimates. Total POL supply would not change, because the fork only moves existing balances.
This matters beyond the sum. Binance’s own account of the breach put the wider loss at about $6.34 billion, and POL is a small share of it.
The trade-off in reversing a chain
Supporters of public blockchains often argue that confirmed transactions cannot be undone. Holding your own private key is supposed to mean nobody else can move the coins.
The proposal tries to fence that in. It applies only to the listed addresses and to native POL, and it sets conditions, including public acknowledgement by the victims and no rival claim to the funds.
There is precedent. Ethereum’s 2016 fork to recover funds from The DAO split off Ethereum Classic, and Sui validators voted in 2025 to return funds frozen after the Cetus exploit.
POL was trading at $0.0958 as of 20:55 UTC on 4 Nov, up about 4.5% over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.
The proposal still needs approval. The fork name, activation block and client release are all to be decided after that, with a rehearsal on the Amoy testnet first.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice.