Binance and Polymarket are backing a Polygon governance proposal that would use a coordinated hard fork to recover approximately 70.49 million POL held in addresses linked to separate security incidents in late October. According to the official Polygon community proposal, the fork would move roughly 23.86 million POL associated with Polymarket and 46.63 million POL associated with Binance into verified recovery addresses without changing POL’s total supply. The proposal valued the combined balance at approximately $6.5 million using POL’s October 29 price.
The assets are currently prevented from moving because all validator-elected Polygon PoS block producers placed five attacker-controlled addresses on their Bor transaction block lists. That intervention is not equivalent to returning the funds. The existing block lists restrict transactions from the addresses, while the proposed hard fork would directly modify Polygon’s state to reassign the native POL balances.
Hard Fork Would Reassign Native POL Balances
The proposed state transition is unusually direct. At a predetermined activation block, Polygon clients would read each listed attacker address’s balance, set it to zero and credit the same amount to a recovery address controlled and verified by either Polymarket or Binance. Heimdall, staking contracts and bridge contracts would remain unchanged. The operation would create no new POL and destroy no existing POL; it would change ownership of existing native balances through consensus.
The Binance-linked address currently contains approximately 46.63 million POL that originated from a compromised Binance hot wallet alongside roughly 6.19 million USDT. Tether has already frozen the USDT, leaving native POL as the portion addressed by the proposed fork. Binance is separately continuing the wider recovery from its roughly $6.3 billion security incident while progressively restoring withdrawals. Recovering this Polygon balance would consequently represent only one component of a substantially larger Binance incident response.
The distinction between the USDT and POL responses also exposes two different control models. Tether can blacklist tokens through issuer-controlled functionality, an intervention model previously demonstrated when Tether froze $182 million across five wallets. Native POL has no equivalent issuer-level freeze-and-reissue mechanism. Returning POL without the holder’s private key therefore requires participating nodes to accept a consensus rule that explicitly changes those balances.
Polygon’s current transaction block list is itself considered too fragile for indefinite use. The proposal says each producer reads its list only at startup, changes require deployment and restart or span rotation, and the filter does not cover every possible transaction path. An attacker has continued attempting to move the funds and, according to the proposal, even contacted validators offering payment for assistance. The hard fork is being proposed because containment has worked so far but does not provide a durable recovery mechanism.
Recovery Proposal Raises a Governance Precedent
The proposal explicitly describes the intervention as an “extreme action” that should not routinely be repeated. Its stated conditions include publicly acknowledged hacks, traceable funds, requests from the affected parties, unanimous block-producer restrictions and no competing claim to the assets. Those safeguards narrow this case, but they do not remove the precedent created when consensus participants demonstrate that native balances can be reassigned after a theft.
Other networks have already faced related questions without using exactly the same mechanism. Arbitrum’s Security Council previously froze 30,766 ETH linked to the KelpDAO exploit, demonstrating how emergency controls can stop assets while simultaneously reopening questions about who can intervene in blockchain state. Polygon’s proposal goes further because it would not merely immobilize the POL but transfer the balance to new owners through a consensus-breaking change.
Approval would still leave several technical stages before recovery. The proposed fork must be implemented in Bor, rehearsed on Amoy and tested through a mainnet-fork replay. Polymarket and Binance must also prove control of their designated recovery addresses. Polygon expects validators, RPC providers, exchanges and explorers to update before the activation block because nodes that fail to install the new release would follow a different chain after the fork.
The balance change would also occur without an ordinary transaction, requiring explorers, indexers and accounting systems to recognize the exceptional state transition. Community discussion has already raised concerns about both those reconciliation requirements and the broader legal and decentralization implications of establishing a recovery precedent. The governance decision therefore extends beyond whether Binance and Polymarket can recover $6.5 million: it tests whether Polygon participants are willing to use consensus itself as an asset-recovery mechanism.
For now, the 70.49 million POL remain blocked rather than recovered. No activation block or client version has been selected, and the proposal requires governance approval before development proceeds toward its Amoy rehearsal. The next concrete milestone is approval of the recovery mechanism itself; only after that can Polygon determine whether and when the one-time state transition reaches mainnet.