A proposal posted to Polygon's governance forum on Nov. 4 calls for a hard fork of the Polygon blockchain to forcibly strip roughly 70.49 million POL, valued near $6.8 million, from hacker-controlled wallets and hand the tokens to Binance and Polymarket.
Accounts differ on who is behind it: some reports say Binance and Polymarket themselves proposed the fork, while others identify the forum post's author as Polygon Labs contributor Parvez03.
The stolen POL splits between two incidents: 46.63 million tokens, close to $4.51 million, sit in a single wallet tied to the Binance hack, which took place on Oct. 29. Another 23.86 million tokens, near $2.31 million, are spread across four addresses linked to a separate Polymarket hack.
Polygon's block producers have already locked down all five addresses as a stopgap. The fork itself would zero out those balances and credit the equivalent amount to recovery wallets designated by Binance and Polymarket, leaving POL's circulating count unchanged.
“Forcibly transferring wallet balances represents an exceptional intervention in a blockchain network,” the proposal states, arguing the step is justified by “publicly acknowledged security incidents, identifiable stolen assets and existing transaction restrictions.”
The authors themselves describe the move as “an exceptional remedy under extremely low-probability security disasters” that “cannot be cited as a standard precedent for resolving routine on-chain disputes.” The 2016 hack of The DAO on Ethereum, and the attempt to claw back the stolen funds, split that network's community and led to the creation of Ethereum Classic.
Polygon's governance call is set to take up the proposal on Nov. 5 at 14:30 UTC. Any changes would first run on the Amoy test network before a mainnet rollout, and no activation date has been set pending approval from the network's governance participants.
