Polygon is set to confront a governance question that cuts to the core of chain immutability: whether it should approve a hard fork to rewrite balances in hacker-linked addresses tied to Polymarket and Binance.
According to the proposal submitted by Polymarket and Binance on Nov. 5, the Polygon PoS mainnet would be hard forked to directly zero out about 70.49 million POL held in the attacker addresses and credit the same amount to recovery addresses designated by the two companies.
The proposal says the operation would leave POL’s total supply unchanged. The hackers’ balances would be removed, while Polymarket and Binance would receive an equal amount in their specified wallets.
The proposal traces back to two Oct. 30 security incidents
The request follows two security breaches that took place at nearly the same time on Oct. 30. Polymarket’s frontend and a Binance hot wallet were both compromised, after which Polygon validators froze the relevant addresses before the stolen assets could be moved.
In Polymarket’s case, four hacker-linked addresses were frozen, involving 23.86 million POL. In Binance’s case, one hacker-linked address was frozen, involving 46.63 million POL. Together, the total comes to about 70.49 million POL.
Freezing the assets did not resolve the recovery issue. The article says Polymarket tried to contact the hacker and seek cooperation in returning the funds, but received no response. The proposal also states that the attacker contacted Polygon validators and offered cash compensation in exchange for unfreezing the addresses.
Polymarket and Binance then moved to submit the hard fork proposal. Their teams are scheduled to defend it at the Polygon Protocol Governance Call, or PPGC, at 22:30 Beijing time on Nov. 5.
Freezing assets is not the same as rewriting balances
The article draws a sharp line between freezing assets and moving funds without private keys. In crypto, coordinated efforts to freeze stolen assets after a security incident have become a common response. Directly changing balances at the protocol level to recover funds is a different step.
Under that distinction, freezing assets restricts the transaction ability of specific addresses within the existing rules, but does not change ownership of the assets themselves. Rewriting balances would mean the protocol can zero out one address and transfer value to another even without a valid private-key signature.
That is where the dispute becomes larger than the two incidents. The article says such a move would run against two basic principles in crypto: the immutability of onchain data and the idea captured in the phrase “Not your keys, not your coins.” If Polygon can use governance to bypass private-key control for an address identified as a hacker wallet today, critics may ask whether the same mechanism could be used against other users tomorrow.
Polymarket and Binance said in the proposal that the requested action is limited to the specific addresses involved in the two incidents. They also said it should not be treated as a routine practice or as the start of a general-purpose recovery framework on Polygon.
Whether Polygon should bear the reputational cost
As of publication, Polygon, members tied to the PPGC, and Polygon core developers had not publicly stated a position on the proposal. The article says the odds of passage do not appear high.
Its reasoning is that Polygon has no obligation to absorb the consequences of security failures at Polymarket and Binance, especially if the price is damage to its own decentralization credentials. In that framing, the risk Polygon would take on is not matched by a clear benefit.
The article lists the amount targeted for recovery as about 70.49 million POL and also describes the value as roughly $6.5 million, while earlier citing $6.7 million. It argues that for two large industry participants such as Polymarket and Binance, the loss is not unmanageable. It also says both had already fully compensated users out of pocket.
From that perspective, the proposal is presented as an attempt to use industry influence or resources to ask Polygon to help recover part of the loss. Even if Polygon were to help two ecosystem partners retrieve the funds, the article says the likely return would be limited to relationship maintenance and goodwill from the two communities, rather than direct gains in network revenue, user growth, or ecosystem competitiveness.
The downside, in contrast, would be immediate scrutiny over whether Polygon still qualifies as a decentralized network that users can trust. On that basis, the article argues that the proposal is likely to fail when weighed against Polygon’s long-term reputation and interests.
There are historical precedents for state intervention by hard fork
The article notes that there have been earlier cases in which a blockchain used a hard fork to directly intervene in attacker-held balances and recover stolen funds.
The best-known example is Ethereum’s DAO incident in 2016. After the DAO smart contract was exploited, about 3.6 million ETH was stolen. At the time, the article says, the amount was worth more than $50 million and represented about 14% of ETH’s total supply. Ethereum’s community ultimately chose to hard fork, move the funds from the attacker address into a refund contract, and return them to investors.
That decision came at a steep cost. It triggered a major community split, with opponents continuing to maintain the original chain that became Ethereum Classic, or ETC. The event is still treated as one of the defining governance episodes in blockchain history and a lasting debate between “Code is law” and the idea that social consensus can intervene in a network.
The article also points to a more recent case involving Core Network. On Oct. 31, about 97 million CORE staked through the b14g protocol was withdrawn without authorization and moved to addresses controlled by an attacker. On Nov. 2, Core Network said it would execute a hard fork and use a one-time onchain state adjustment to transfer and recover 68,146,177.22 CORE from three attacker-controlled addresses, equal to 70.2% of the CORE affected in the Oct. 31 incident. The article says the recovery method was broadly similar to what Polymarket and Binance are now asking Polygon to do.
Why the article says Polygon’s case is different
Even though both of those hard forks were carried out, the article argues that the surrounding conditions were very different from Polygon’s current situation.
Its view is that those earlier interventions took place when the project side could not fully absorb user losses and when the incidents had major consequences for the network itself. Here, by contrast, Polymarket and Binance are described as fully capable of covering user losses, and the article says they already have. It also says the 70.49 million POL in question accounts for less than 1% of POL’s circulating supply.
Even if the hacker were eventually able to sell all of the tokens, the article argues that the impact on Polygon’s token price, staking, gas fees, and the broader ecosystem would be limited.
Still, it leaves room for another outcome. Given the relationship between Polymarket and Polygon, along with Binance’s influence as a major platform, the article says Polygon could still decide to make an exception and alter the balances.
The answer, it says, will come on the night of Nov. 5.
