- Polygon proposed a hard fork to recover 70.49 million POL, worth approx. $6.5 million, from five blocked addresses.
- The funds would be transferred to recovery wallets designated by Binance and Polymarket, pending governance approval and a network upgrade.
Polygon is considering a hard fork that would transfer approximately 70.49 million POL, worth around $6.5 million at the reference price used in the proposal, from five blocked addresses to recovery wallets designated by Binance and Polymarket.
The Polygon Improvement Proposal (PIP) was published on the network’s community forum on November 4 by Parvez03, a member of the Polygon Labs Validator Support Team. The proposal was co-developed with the two affected companies and calls for a one-time change to the Polygon PoS network’s ledger.
The funds are linked to separate security incidents involving Binance and Polymarket on October 29 and 30. Four addresses associated with the Polymarket incident hold 23.86 million POL, while a fifth address linked to Binance contains another 46.63 million POL.
The combined balance is 70,489,329.34 POL. The proposal uses a POL price of $0.0924 on October 29 to estimate its value at approximately $6.5 million.
How the Polygon proposed recovery would work
If approved, the hard fork would set the POL balances of the five listed addresses to zero at a designated block and credit the corresponding amounts to verified recovery wallets belonging to Binance and Polymarket. The network’s total POL supply would remain unchanged.
Polygon block producers have already blocked transactions from the identified addresses, preventing the funds from moving. However, the existing restrictions cannot return the assets to their owners. The proposal also says attackers have attempted to bypass the restrictions and approached validators with offers of payment.
The proposed transfer is limited to native POL held in the five specified addresses. Around 6.18 million USDT sent to the Binance-linked address is excluded because Tether has already frozen those funds. Other Binance-related blocked addresses are also excluded.
The proposal is due for discussion during Polygon’s Protocol Governance Call on November 5 at 14:30 UTC. If approved, development and testing on the Amoy testnet are expected to take around two weeks before a possible mainnet activation. The recovery has not yet been approved or completed.
