Polygon has proposed a hard fork of the Polygon PoS network to recover about 70.49 million POL stolen during incidents involving Polymarket and Binance in late October 2026. The proposal matters because blocking the attacker addresses prevented further transfers but did not return the assets, valued at about $6.5 million at the time of the incidents, to the affected companies.

The Polygon Improvement Proposal was published on the Polygon forum. It calls for the balances of five blocked attacker addresses to be reset and the corresponding POL to be credited to verified wallets controlled by Polymarket and Binance.

Funds covered by the proposal

The proposal covers funds from two separate incidents on Oct. 29. During the Polymarket attack, about 28 million POL was involved. Roughly 23.86 million POL remained across four addresses that validators added to their blacklist.

After the Binance hack late on Oct. 29, 46.63 million POL and 6.19 million USDT were sent to an attacker address. Tether later froze the stablecoins, while the POL remained at risk. The proposal seeks to return that POL balance to Binance.

In total, the five addresses hold about 70.49 million POL. The plan would credit about 23.86 million POL to a Polymarket wallet and 46.63 million POL to a Binance address.

Polymarket resumed trading after a third-party service was hacked. The attackers caused losses of more than $2.6 million.

The proposal’s authors said the existing blocking mechanism depends on lists that validators load when starting nodes. Each change requires a software update and either a Bor restart or span rotation, while the mechanism itself cannot return the funds to their owners.

The proposal also records attempts to bypass the restrictions. On Oct. 30, the attacker tried to submit a transaction with a fee of about 219,450 POL and offered validators money to unblock the transfer.

How the hard fork would work

If approved, the hard fork would reset the balances of the five attacker addresses to zero at a designated network block and credit the corresponding amounts to the affected companies’ wallets. The total POL supply would remain unchanged, and the change would not affect other tokens or addresses outside the agreed list.

Before activation, Polymarket and Binance must confirm control of the receiving addresses through methods such as a signed message or test transaction. They must also provide written confirmation that the wallets belong to them.

The proposal was scheduled to be presented during the Polygon Protocol Governance Call on Nov. 5 at 14:30 UTC. After approval, developers would prepare a client update and test it on the Amoy network, a process expected to take about two weeks.

Validators, remote procedure call service operators and blockchain explorer operators would receive an update notice before activation. A sufficient share of stake must migrate to the new version to prevent a network split.

The authors described the proposal as an exceptional response to the specific incidents rather than a general mechanism for freezing and returning assets. They said such decisions should not become standard practice because changing a user’s balance without access to the private key requires intervention at the network consensus level.

Disclaimer: This material is for informational purposes only and is not advertising gambling or a call to participate in it. Polymarket is mentioned solely as part of a digital asset market overview and is not intended to popularize or promote the platform.

Source: Incrypted