Polygon Labs member proposes hard fork to recover 70.49m POL stolen from Binance
A member of the network's validator support team published a proposal to move stolen funds to recovery addresses following a record $6.3bn breach of the Binance exchange.
Key takeaways
- 1Proposal seeks to recover 70.49 million POL tokens worth $6.5 million.
- 2Stolen funds are currently restricted from transfer by block-producing nodes.
- 3Hard fork would move assets to verified recovery addresses without changing supply.
- 4Recovery follows a $6.3 billion breach of the Binance exchange.
- 5Technical implementation is expected to take two weeks if approved.
A member of the Polygon Labs validator support team proposed a hard fork on 5 November to recover 70.49 million POL tokens stolen from Polymarket and Binance. Wu Blockchain reported that the Polygon Improvement Proposal (PIP) seeks to return assets valued at approximately $6.5 million based on prices from late October.
The proposal targets 23.86 million POL taken from Polymarket and 46.63 million POL from Binance. Block-producing nodes have already restricted the transfer of these funds on the Polygon PoS mainnet. The hard fork would move the balances from attacker addresses to recovery addresses verified by the two companies.
The total supply of the POL token will not change if the proposal is implemented. The recovery effort follows the $6.3 billion heist at Binance, which YourKhabri reported as the largest in the history of the crypto industry. Approximately $2.85 billion of those stolen funds have been frozen or seized across multiple networks so far.
Other blockchain networks have recently used similar methods to reverse thefts linked to the Binance breach. On 2 November, the Core network executed a fork to recover 68.15 million CORE tokens, representing about 70 percent of the amount taken from its network. Synthetix also recovered 8.4 million SNX tokens and secured them in a multisig wallet after the same incident.
Polygon's proposal is scheduled for discussion at the Polygon Protocol Governance Call on Thursday. If the plan receives support from the community and validators, developers expect to finish technical preparations in two weeks. The change requires the cooperation of the independent validators that secure the network.
While the fork addresses specific tokens on Polygon, the broader recovery of the Binance funds continues. YourKhabri data shows that hackers have used THORChain to swap stolen Solana for Bitcoin. Binance has pledged $6.34 billion to cover customer losses, while Circle and Tether have frozen over $1.7 billion in linked assets.
The recovery addresses will be designated and verified by Binance and Polymarket to ensure the funds reach the correct parties. This mechanism allows the network to intervene in the event of major exploits without altering the underlying tokenomics. The proposal is part of a series of technical responses by various protocols to the October breach.
POL was trading at roughly $0.09 when the valuation for the proposal was calculated. Chainlink was trading at $11.35 on Thursday, a 4.7 percent increase in 24 hours, with a market value of $8.7 billion. The governance call will decide if the network proceeds with the client updates and testnet rehearsals.
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