A proposal from Polymarket and Binance would use a Polygon PoS hard fork to recover approximately 70.49 million POL from frozen hacker-controlled addresses—raising a question that goes beyond the thefts: should network governance be able to move funds without the holder’s private-key signature?
Reporting context: This article summarizes Golem’s Odaily report, published via PANews on November 5, 2026, at 21:00 UTC+8. At that point, the proposal had not been decided. A Polygon Protocol Governance Call discussion was scheduled for 22:30 Beijing time that evening.
What the proposal would change
According to the report, Polymarket and Binance submitted the proposal on November 5. It would zero out balances in the identified attacker addresses and credit equivalent amounts to recovery addresses designated by the two companies. POL’s total supply would remain unchanged.
The report initially valued the funds at approximately $6.7 million, although a later passage used $6.5 million for the same 70.49 million POL.
The proposal followed two security incidents on October 30: a compromise of Polymarket’s frontend and an attack on Binance’s hot wallet. Polygon validators reportedly froze:
- 23.86 million POL across four addresses linked to the Polymarket attack.
- 46.63 million POL in one address linked to the Binance attack.
Those freezes prevented the attackers from transferring the funds, but did not return them. Polymarket reportedly sought the attacker’s cooperation without receiving a response. According to the proposal, an attacker also approached Polygon validators with an offer of cash in exchange for unfreezing addresses.
Both companies had already fully compensated affected users from their own funds, the report said. The proposed fork would therefore recover losses the companies had absorbed, rather than provide compensation still owed to users.
Why freezing and recovery are different
The central dispute is about the scope of governance intervention.
A freeze restricts an address’s ability to transact. The proposed fork would go further: it would alter balances and reassign funds without signatures from the affected addresses.
Polymarket and Binance described the intervention as limited to the specific addresses involved in these two incidents. They said it should not become routine or establish a general asset-freezing and recovery mechanism for Polygon.
Golem’s analysis questioned whether that limitation would prevent a precedent. Once governance authorizes one such recovery, other projects could seek similar treatment after future attacks. The author argued that Polygon’s potential reputational cost could outweigh the benefit of helping two ecosystem partners recover their losses.
That is an editorial assessment—not evidence that Polygon had rejected the proposal. At publication, the report said Polygon officials, relevant governance-call participants and core developers had not publicly stated their positions.
Earlier forks show the trade-off
The report cited two precedents for intervention through a hard fork:
- Ethereum’s 2016 DAO response: Following the theft of approximately 3.6 million ETH, then worth more than $50 million and described in the report as roughly 14% of ETH’s supply, a fork moved affected funds into a refund contract. Opposition to that intervention produced the split that became Ethereum Classic.
- Core Network’s November 2 response: After approximately 97 million CORE staked through the b14g protocol were withdrawn without authorization on October 31, Core Network announced a fork recovering 68,146,177.22 CORE from three attacker-controlled addresses—approximately 70.2% of the affected amount.
Golem argued that Polygon’s situation differed because Polymarket and Binance had already covered user losses, while the targeted POL represented less than 1% of circulating supply.
The author considered rejection more likely, but acknowledged that Polymarket’s relationship with Polygon and Binance’s influence could still help secure an exception. The supplied report contains no governance decision or confirmation that the fork occurred.