Overview
- A Polygon Improvement Proposal posted on November 4 and placed on Thursday's governance call asks validators to hard-fork the Polygon PoS chain to zero five attacker-controlled addresses and recredit roughly 70.49 million POL to verified recovery wallets.
- The funds trace to two late-October incidents with about 23.86M POL linked to Polymarket across four addresses and about 46.63M POL tied to a Binance hot wallet held in a single address.
- Polygon block producers have already added the five addresses to a transaction blocklist that prevents transfers but does not return funds, and the proposal argues that the blocklist is operationally fragile and cannot replace a protocol-level remedy.
- The PIP requires Polymarket and Binance to prove control of designated recovery addresses, calls for about two weeks of client development and Amoy testnet rehearsals if approved, and warns that nodes that fail to install the upgrade would follow an incompatible chain.
- Supporters frame the change as an exceptional, one-time fix to recover on-chain POL that victims have largely already reimbursed off-chain, while critics warn it sets precedent for rewriting balances and could invite future legal or political demands.