Polygon proposes hard fork to recover $6.8 million in stolen Binance and Polymarket funds

Polygon developers have introduced a governance proposal for a mainnet hard fork to recover 70.49 million stolen POL tokens, worth roughly $6.5 million to $7 million, following breaches at Binance and Polymarket on October 29, 2026. The fork would zero out five frozen attacker addresses and return the supply-neutral funds to verified victim accounts. The plan faces community discussion on November 5, 2026, followed by two weeks of testnet validation if approved.

Polygon hard fork proposal and state-change mechanics

• ▪A proposed Polygon hard fork to recover stolen Binance and Polymarket funds is supply-neutral and would not change the total supply of POL tokens by minting or burning coins
• ▪The proposed Polygon recovery fork covers only native POL locked on the Polygon PoS chain, while other stolen assets like USDT fall outside the proposal's scope
• ▪Polygon member Parvez03 published a Polygon Improvement Proposal, proposing a mainnet hard fork to recover approximately 70.49 million stolen POL tokens
• ▪A proposed Polygon hard fork to recover stolen Binance and Polymarket funds would zero out five attacker-controlled addresses and transfer matching amounts to verified recovery accounts controlled by Binance and Polymarket at a predetermined block number

Governance timeline and deployment plan

• ▪If approved by Polygon governance, hard fork client development and validation on Polygon's Amoy testnet are expected to take approximately two weeks before mainnet deployment
• ▪The Polygon community scheduled the hard fork proposal to recover stolen Binance and Polymarket funds for discussion on the Protocol Governance Call on November 5, 2026, at 14:30 UTC

Binance and Polymarket exploits involving POL tokens

• ▪The Binance security incident on October 29, 2026 involved 46.63 million POL tokens, worth approximately $4.51 million, which were transferred to a single attacker address
• ▪Polymarket temporarily suspended trading and restricted international traders to order cancellations on October 29, 2026, after a compromised third-party script integrated into its platform attacked logged-in users
• ▪The Polymarket breach on October 29, 2026 involved 23.86 million POL tokens, worth approximately $2.31 million, distributed across four attacker-controlled addresses

Blockchain immutability

• ▪Polygon developers proposed to intentionally rewrite account balances, an action that public blockchains rarely perform
• ▪Public blockchain immutability relies on confirmed transactions remaining unalterable to maintain trust across decentralized ledgers