Source report published November 5, 2026, at 13:36:06 UTC+8. The proposal remained unresolved at that reporting cutoff.
Polymarket and Binance proposed a Polygon PoS hard fork that would erase approximately 70.49 million POL from five frozen attacker addresses and credit equivalent balances to recovery addresses they designated, according to Odaily’s Golem.
The matching deductions and credits would leave POL’s total supply unchanged. But the proposal raises a governance question that freezing alone does not: should a network override private-key control to recover stolen assets?
The source initially valued the POL at $6.7 million, then used approximately $6.5 million later in the article. It did not reconcile those estimates.
What led to the proposal?
According to the report, attackers compromised Polymarket’s front end and a Binance hot wallet on October 30. Polygon validators responded by freezing:
- Four addresses linked to the Polymarket attack, holding 23.86 million POL.
- One address linked to the Binance attack, holding 46.63 million POL.
Those freezes prevented the attackers from moving the assets, but did not return them. Polymarket sought cooperation from the attacker without receiving a response. According to the proposal, an attacker also contacted Polygon validators and offered cash in exchange for unfreezing the addresses.
The report linked that attempted inducement to the decision to seek a hard fork. Polymarket and Binance were scheduled to present their case at a Polygon Protocol Governance Call, or PPGC, at 22:30 Beijing time on November 5.
At publication, Odaily reported that Polygon’s official channels, relevant PPGC participants and core developers had not publicly stated their positions. The supplied article contains no meeting outcome or subsequent decision.
Freezing funds versus rewriting balances
The proposed intervention goes beyond restricting transactions. A freeze leaves balances in place; this hard fork would change account balances without signatures from the affected addresses’ private keys.
Polymarket and Binance described the requested action as a limited response to these two incidents. They said it should neither become routine nor establish a general Polygon mechanism for freezing and recovering assets.
Golem’s analysis questioned whether that limitation would prevent a precedent. If governance can authorize a balance reassignment in one theft case, other projects could seek the same treatment after future attacks. The article framed that possibility as a risk to Polygon’s decentralization credentials and confidence in the durability of its rules.
Both companies had already fully compensated affected users from their own funds, according to the report. Recovery would therefore reimburse losses they had absorbed, rather than provide compensation still owed to users.
Golem argued that helping two ecosystem partners might preserve relationships and community goodwill, but would not directly translate into network revenue, user growth or greater ecosystem competitiveness. On that basis, the author judged approval unlikely—not as a confirmed governance position, but as an assessment of the reputational trade-off. The article nevertheless acknowledged that Polymarket’s relationship with Polygon and Binance’s influence could encourage an exception.
The historical comparisons
The article discussed two earlier interventions:
- Ethereum’s DAO fork in 2016. Odaily described roughly 3.6 million ETH stolen, valued at more than $50 million at the time, and stated that this represented about 14% of ETH supply. It said the fork redirected funds to a refund contract. The decision split the community, with opponents maintaining the original chain as Ethereum Classic. The supply percentage is presented here as the source’s claim, not an independently verified figure.
- Core Network’s November 2 intervention. Following the unauthorized withdrawal of approximately 97 million CORE staked through b14g on October 31, Core Network announced a hard fork using a one-time state adjustment. According to the report, it recovered 68,146,177.22 CORE from three attacker-controlled addresses, approximately 70.2% of the affected amount.
Golem argued that those cases involved greater network consequences and an inability to cover losses, unlike the Polygon request. The report put the disputed POL at less than 1% of circulating supply and assessed that even a complete attacker sell-off would have little substantive effect on POL’s price, staking, gas fees or the wider ecosystem. That was the author’s assessment, not a demonstrated outcome.
The unresolved issue at publication was whether Polygon would treat recovery as a justified exception—or reject it to avoid establishing a mechanism for governance-led balance reassignment.