Polygon (POL) Hard Fork Proposed to Return $6.8M in Stolen Tokens

By Nodora News · 5 November 2026

Binance and Polymarket back a Polygon (POL) hard fork that would move 70.49M frozen POL, about $6.8M, from hacker wallets to verified recovery addresses.

A proposed Polygon (POL) hard fork would take about 70.49 million POL, worth roughly $6.8 million, out of five frozen hacker-controlled wallets and hand it back to Binance and Polymarket. The Polygon Improvement Proposal (PIP) was posted on the Polygon community forum on November 4 and is due to be presented at the Polygon Protocol Governance Call on November 5 at 14:30 UTC (1:30 am AEDT on November 6). Nothing has been approved yet, and no activation date has been set.

Key takeaways

• About 70.49M POL (roughly $6.8M at today's price) sits in five addresses that Polygon's block producers have already blocked.
• Around 23.86M POL is tied to the October 29 Polymarket incident, and about 46.63M POL to the record Binance hack the same night.
• The fork would zero those five balances at a fixed block and credit the same amounts to verified Binance and Polymarket recovery wallets, with no change to POL's total supply.
• The plan still needs governance approval and a rehearsal on the Amoy testnet; the proposal suggests around two weeks of work after approval.
• POL trades near $0.0969 on OKX, up about 3.6% in 24 hours.

What the Polygon hard fork proposal says

The proposal was written by a member of the Polygon Labs validator support team and is formally presented by the two victims, Binance and Polymarket. It asks Polygon PoS validators to approve one coordinated hard fork, which is a rule change that every node must upgrade to, aimed at a closed list of addresses named in advance.

At the activation block, the network would read each listed address's native POL balance, set it to zero, and add the same amount to a recovery address chosen by the relevant victim. Before that happens, both companies must prove they control their recovery addresses, for example by signing a message, and confirm in writing that the wallets are theirs.

The change only touches native POL, the token used to pay gas on Polygon PoS. Other assets are out of scope. The 6.19 million USDT that also landed in the Binance-linked address has already been frozen by Tether.

The numbers behind the stolen POL

According to the proposal's address tables:

• Polymarket: four blocked addresses holding a combined 23,862,736 POL. About 28 million POL was involved in the incident, and the blocked wallets hold roughly 24 million of it.
• Binance: one blocked address holding 46,626,593 POL. It received about 46.63 million POL plus 6.19 million USDT from a Binance hot wallet late on October 29.
• Total: about 70.49 million POL. The proposal values it at about $6.5 million using the October 29 price of $0.0924; at today's OKX price it is closer to $6.8 million.

For context, Binance has put its total hack losses at about $6.3 billion across many chains, so this Polygon slice is small. You can read the background in our coverage of the record Binance hack and of how the attack began with a fake job interview.

Why a block list is not enough

Polygon's block producers added the five addresses to a transaction block list at the victims' request on October 29 and 30. That stopped the funds from moving, but the proposal calls it a stopgap. Each block producer only reads the list when it starts up, entries never expire on their own, and the filter checks only certain senders, so it is not a full freeze.

The attacker has also kept trying. The proposal says a pending transaction offering a fee of about 219,450 POL was spotted on October 30, and that the attacker contacted validators offering cash to help unblock a transaction. Polymarket opened an on-chain recovery channel to the attacker through the SEAL Safe Harbor programme but got no reply.

The authors say leaving about 70 million POL locked forever is neither stable nor fair to the owners, and that a consensus change is the only way to move a balance without the owner's private key.

Why it matters for Polygon and POL holders

Moving balances by hard fork is one of the most sensitive things a blockchain can do. Critics of such steps argue they weaken the idea that on-chain balances can't be changed by a small group. The proposal tries to answer that by calling the move "extreme," limiting it to five named addresses, and listing strict conditions: a publicly admitted theft, a victim that presents the request, a block every producer has applied, a meaningful amount, and funds that can be traced on-chain to the victim. It also says future requests that don't meet all of those conditions should not treat this as a precedent.

There are practical risks too. Any validator, exchange or RPC provider that doesn't upgrade before the fork block would end up on a different chain. Explorers and accounting tools will have to handle a balance change that isn't backed by a normal transaction.

Both Binance and Polymarket say they have already reimbursed most affected users, so the fork is mainly about recovering assets still stuck on-chain rather than making individual users whole.

Market reaction: POL price on OKX

POL has not reacted sharply to the news. On OKX, POL/USDT trades around:

• Price: about $0.0969
• 24h change: about +3.6%
• 24h range: $0.0926 to $0.0976

That move is in line with the wider market, where Bitcoin (BTC) is up about 3.4% near $80,680 and Ether (ETH) about 5.8% near $2,432. Track more coins on the Nodora charts page.

What to watch next

• The governance call: the November 5 presentation is the first public test of support among validators and the wider Polygon community.
• Approval and testing: if approved, client code would be built and rehearsed on the Amoy testnet. The proposal calls about two weeks workable and one week tight.
• The activation block: a fork name, client release and activation block will only be set after approval, along with notices to validators, RPC providers and explorers.
• Fresh balances: the five addresses will be re-read at the snapshot block, and any change from the published figures will be disclosed.

This article is for information only and is not financial advice.

#Polygon #Binance #Polymarket #Hack #Governance

This article is general information, not financial advice.