Binance and Polymarket Propose Polygon Hard Fork to Recover $6.8M in Stolen POL Tokens

The governance proposal published recently outlines plans to recover 23.86 million POL tokens, worth $2.31 million, distributed across four addresses linked to the Polymarket breach, alongside 46.63 million POL tokens valued at about $4.51 million held in a single address tied to the Binance incident.

The proposed hard fork aims to eliminate the stolen tokens from the five attacker-controlled addresses and transfer them to verified recovery wallets assigned by Polymarket and Binance. This procedure is intended to occur at a predetermined block without altering the overall supply of POL tokens.

Polygon’s block producers have proactively blocked transactions from the compromised addresses to stop the stolen funds from moving. Nevertheless, the proposal clarifies that these are only temporary interventions and do not restore the funds to their rightful owners.

This recovery plan awaits approval through governance processes and must undergo testing on Polygon’s Amoy testnet prior to deployment. The governance discussion is scheduled for November 5, but no definitive date has yet been set for the mainnet hard fork activation.

This initiative follows Binance’s unprecedented $6.3 billion hack on October 29 and a separate event where Polymarket temporarily halted trading after a third-party service provider was compromised.

This hard fork proposal is significant as it demonstrates coordinated efforts between major crypto platforms to recover stolen assets, ensuring security and trust within the Polygon ecosystem.