Polygon’s $6.8M POL Heist Gets a Hard-Fork Rewind, Pending Governance Approval 🦖

Polygon validators are considering a hard fork designed to recover approximately 70.49 million POL tokens stolen from Binance and Polymarket, with reported values ranging from about $6.5 million to $6.8 million. The proposal would redirect 23.86 million POL, worth $2.31 million, from four addresses linked to the Polymarket incident and 46.63 million POL, worth about $4.51 million, from one address tied to the Binance hack.

The tokens are already immobilized on Polygon PoS after validator-elected block producers added the five attacker-controlled addresses to Bor’s transaction blocklist. If governance approves the proposal, a hard fork would remove the stolen tokens from those addresses and transfer them to verified recovery wallets designated by Binance and Polymarket. The change would occur at a predetermined block without altering POL’s total supply.

A member of the Polygon Labs Validator Support Team submitted the proposal, which is scheduled for discussion on the Polygon Protocol Governance Call on Nov. 5. Approval would be followed by client development and testnet rehearsals, which developers expect to complete within approximately two weeks. The plan would also need to be tested on Polygon’s Amoy testnet before activation; no mainnet hard-fork date has been confirmed.

The proposal follows separate security incidents on Oct. 29 and Oct. 30, 2026. Polymarket temporarily suspended trading after reporting that a third-party provider had been compromised, while Binance suffered what was described as a record $6.3 billion hack on Oct. 29. Polygon block producers said their restrictions on the affected addresses are temporary and cannot return the funds to their owners, prompting the proposed recovery mechanism.