Polygon has proposed a major network upgrade to recover approximately 70.49 million POL tokens, worth around $6.5 million, that were stolen in two separate security incidents involving Polymarket and Binance in October 2026.
The proposal aims to move the stolen tokens from five attacker-controlled wallets into recovery wallets designated by the compromised companies.
The Polygon team noted that five attacker-controlled addresses hold about 70.49 million POL: about 23.86 million POL across four addresses from the Polymarket incident and about 46.63 million POL from one address linked to the Binance incident. The funds cannot move, but nothing in the current setup lets them be returned either.
What Polygon needs to do
Polygon’s block producers have already added these addresses to their transaction blocklists to prevent the attackers from moving the funds further. However, this measure only freezes the assets and does not return them to their actual owners.
The existing system also requires block producers to restart their infrastructure whenever blocklist changes are made, making it difficult to maintain these restrictions over time.
To address this issue, Polygon has proposed a hard fork, a major network upgrade that changes the blockchain’s underlying rules.
Under the proposal, at a predetermined block, the POL balances of the five identified wallets would be reduced to zero. The same amounts would then be credited to recovery addresses verified and designated by Polymarket and Binance.
For this plan to succeed, the proposal requires both companies to prove ownership of their designated recovery addresses before the upgrade. If approved, developers will first implement and test the changes on Polygon’s Amoy testnet before deploying them on mainnet.
Validators, exchanges, and node operators will also need to upgrade their software before activation.
Decentralization concerns
The proposal has raised important questions about decentralization and user ownership. Normally, blockchain transactions cannot be reversed or wallet balances moved without the owner’s private keys. Polygon’s proposed intervention would override this principle through a consensus-level change.
The network argued that it is an extreme action that should not be reproduced commonly.
At the time of writing, Polygon’s MATIC was trading at $0.098 after a 2.08% increase in the past 24 hours.
Meanwhile, 21Shares recently withdrew approximately $11 million worth of POL from Coinbase over the past 30 days, including 45.7 million POL worth $4.08 million on 28th October, leaving concerns intact.
Final summary
As of now, Polygon’s block producers have already added these addresses to their transaction blocklists. At the same time, the proposal has raised important questions about decentralization and user ownership.
