Polygon proposal would hard-fork the chain to return POL taken in the Polymarket hack

A member of Polygon Labs’ validator support team posted a Polygon Improvement Proposal on November 4, 2026, asking for a coordinated hard fork of the Polygon PoS network to return POL stolen in the October 29 Polymarket hack and a separate Binance hack. The proposal names Polymarket and Binance as its proposers.

At a fixed block, the fork would set the native POL balance of five attacker-controlled addresses to zero and credit the same amount to recovery addresses designated by Polymarket or Binance. Total supply would not change.

What is at stake

The five addresses hold about 70.49 million POL, worth roughly $6.5 million at the October 29 spot price of $0.0924 per POL. About 23.86 million POL sits in four addresses linked to the Polymarket incident, out of roughly 28 million POL involved. The other 46.63 million POL sits in one address linked to Binance.

Polygon’s block producers have already added the addresses to a block list at the victims’ request, so for now the funds cannot move. The proposal calls that a stopgap: each producer reads the list only at startup, and entries do not expire automatically. The attacker has kept trying, including a pending transaction on October 30 offering a fee of about 219,450 POL, and has offered validators cash to help push a transaction through. Polymarket also opened an on-chain recovery channel to the attacker and got no response.

What happened at Polymarket

In its post-mortem, Polymarket says a third-party vendor’s performance-monitoring script on polymarket.com was compromised on October 29. For some users with the site open during a short window, the altered script used their active session to sell positions and move funds out of their wallets. Polymarket paused trading, removed the script and reset all login sessions.

Polymarket is returning $3.9 million to traders in total: $2.7 million plus $1.2 million to cover losses from the trading pause. As of October 30, it had refunded 95% of affected wallets in full.

What comes next

The proposal was scheduled for presentation at the Polygon Protocol Governance Call on November 5 at 14:30 UTC. The fork activates only if the proposal passes Polygon’s governance process. Each victim must also prove it controls its recovery address and confirm it in writing. After approval, client development and a rehearsal on the Amoy testnet would follow, with about two weeks described as workable.

Every validator, RPC provider and exchange running Polygon PoS would have to upgrade, and nodes that don’t would follow a different chain. The proposal itself calls the fork “an extreme action that should not be reproduced commonly.” If it passes, Polygon would move balances tied to an attack on Polymarket’s users, and the proposal says future requests that don’t meet the same conditions should not treat it as precedent.

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