Polygon proposes hard fork to recover $7M in stolen Binance, Polymarket funds

A new governance proposal would zero out five attacker-controlled addresses and send roughly 70.49 million POL back to verified recovery accounts Polygon developers want to do something blockchains rarely do: rewrite balances on purpose. A new Polygon Improvement Proposal (PIP) calls for a hard fork of the Polygon Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mainnet to claw back stolen tokens tied to separate security incidents at Binance and Polymarket. The target is roughly 70.49 million native POL, worth around $7 million, sitting in five attacker-controlled addresses. The tokens are already frozen. The fork would move them back to their rightful owners. What the proposal would actually do The PIP was introduced on November 4, 2026, by Parvez03, a member of the Polygon Labs validator support team. It describes an exceptional state change to the network’s ledger, not a routine upgrade. The stolen funds trace back to two incidents on October 29 and 30. About 23.86 million POL ended up across four addresses connected to the Polymarket breach. Another roughly 46.63 million POL sits in a single address linked to the Binance incident. Under the proposal, all five addresses would have their balances set to ze...