Binance and Polymarket ask Polygon to hard fork and rewrite balances to claw back about 70 million POL stolen in their hacks

Polymarket and Binance have asked Polygon to change its ledger by hard fork to take back tokens stolen in security incidents at both companies on October 29, according to a proposal posted on Polygon's governance forum on November 4. At a set block, the balances of five attacker-controlled addresses would be set to zero and the same amounts credited to recovery addresses that each company must first prove it controls. Total POL supply would not change.

The proposal covers about 70.49 million POL, which it values at about $6.5 million at the October 29 price: roughly 23.86 million across four Polymarket-linked addresses and about 46.63 million at one Binance-linked address. Cointelegraph and crypto.news reported that Polygon's block producers have already blocked transfers from the addresses, but the proposal says those blocks are temporary and cannot return the funds.

The plan needs governance approval and a rehearsal on Polygon's Amoy test network, which the proposal says would take about two weeks after approval. One forum commenter warned it could set a precedent for legal or government freeze requests on native POL. The author calls it an "extreme action that should not be reproduced commonly," crypto.news reported.