Polygon Labs considers a hard fork to recover assets from Polymarket and Binance hacks

• Polygon Labs team proposed a hard fork to recover POL linked to the Polymarket and Binance hacks.
• The hard fork will transfer 23.86 million POL linked to Polymarket and 46.63 million POL from Binance to a recovery wallet.
• The proposal is scheduled for discussion on Thursday, with a roughly two-week implementation timeline, if approved.

Polygon Labs’ new improvement proposal calls for a hard fork on Polygon Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mainnet to recover assets linked to the Polymarket and Binance hacks. The proposal will require validators to transfer the POL tokens from the five attacker-controlled addresses to verified recovery addresses, as an unusual one-off governance action to reverse the effects.

Hard fork discussions to return blocked assets 

The final investigation report from Polymarket of its security incident on October 30 shows roughly 28 million POL on Polygon PoS, out of which 24 million POL were later frozen upon request. Similarly, the $6.3 billion Binance hack report also saw a similar transfer of over 46 million POL tokens from its own hot wallet. The total of 70.49 million native POL is held within five attacker-controlled addresses, which Polygon’s block producers have added to the Bor transaction block list.

Although the assets are blocked, the temporary measure serves as a stopgap because each block producer loads the Bor list only at startup, so updates require restarts or span rotations. Additionally, the entries do not expire automatically, while the filter covers only certain transaction types. To bypass these restrictions, the attackers have tested offering high-fee transactions and contacted validators to unblock funds in exchange for a lucrative payment.

The mechanism remains fragile as it keeps tens of millions of POL locked indefinitely without offering a refund solution. Polygon Labs team member has proposed an extreme action to hard fork the PoS mainnet under Section 5 of the Specification and the Rationale.

The Polygon Improvement Proposal (PIP) is scheduled to be presented at the Polygon Protocol Governance Call on Wednesday. If approved, the implementation is expected to take roughly two weeks.

The PIP to move balances without private keys requires a consensus change, leaving a hard fork as the only technical path. The proposers emphasize that this is not a general freeze-or-recover tool and should not be reproduced commonly. 

The PIP lists six checkable conditions to justify the hard fork, including public acknowledgment by the victims, universal application of the blocklist, a large sum, clear on-chain tracing to reputable parties, the victims themselves requesting the remedy, and the absence of competing claims after public disclosure.

Other than a hard fork, proposers also considered alternatives such as leaving the funds locked, relying on attacker cooperation, or building a permanent protocol-level recovery mechanism, but rejected them.