A proposal to recover stolen POL put Polygon’s governance community in front of a familiar crypto dilemma: should a network override wallet balances to reverse a theft, even after the funds have already been frozen?
In a report published on November 5, 2026, at 21:00 Beijing time (UTC+8), Odaily contributor Golem described a joint request from Polymarket and Binance for a Polygon PoS hard fork. The proposal would zero out approximately 70.49 million POL held in attacker addresses and credit equivalent balances to recovery addresses designated by the two companies. Total POL supply would remain unchanged.
The report initially valued the funds at $6.7 million, but later used approximately $6.5 million. It did not explain the difference.
Frozen funds, but no agreement to return them
According to the report, the proposal followed two security incidents on October 30 involving Polymarket’s front end and a Binance hot wallet. Polygon validators froze four addresses associated with the Polymarket attack, containing 23.86 million POL, and one associated with the Binance attack, containing 46.63 million POL.
Those freezes prevented the attackers from moving the assets, but did not return them. Polymarket sought cooperation from the attacker without receiving a reply. According to the proposal, an attacker also contacted Polygon validators and offered cash in exchange for unfreezing the addresses.
Golem reported that concern about validators accepting such an offer helped motivate the joint recovery proposal. Polymarket and Binance were scheduled to present their case at a Polygon Protocol Governance Call, or PPGC, at 22:30 Beijing time on November 5—after the article’s publication.
At publication, the report said Polygon’s official representatives, relevant PPGC participants and core developers had not publicly stated their positions. The supplied article records a proposal, not an approved or completed fork.
The dispute is about authority, not just recovery
The central distinction in Golem’s analysis was between freezing funds and moving them without a private-key signature. A freeze restricts transactions; the proposed fork would directly change balances and place the recovered value under someone else’s control.
For a community built around private-key ownership and resistance to discretionary intervention, that distinction carries weight. Golem argued that making an exception could encourage other projects to seek similar treatment after future security incidents, potentially damaging confidence in Polygon’s decentralization.
Polymarket and Binance, according to the report, explicitly limited their request to the addresses involved in these two incidents. They said it should not become routine or establish a general-purpose freezing and recovery mechanism.
The report also said both companies had already fully compensated affected users. In that context, Golem framed the fork as a way for the companies to recover their own losses rather than a prerequisite for making users whole.
Golem considered approval unlikely, arguing that Polygon would bear reputational risk without a comparable direct benefit. That was the author’s assessment—not a declared governance outcome. The article also acknowledged that Polymarket’s relationship with Polygon and Binance’s industry influence could help secure an exception.
Earlier forks show why precedent matters
The article compared the request with Ethereum’s response to The DAO exploit in 2016. It described approximately 3.6 million ETH being stolen, worth more than $50 million at the time, and characterized that amount as roughly 14% of the then-existing supply. Ethereum’s subsequent fork moved the affected funds into a refund contract, while opponents continued the original chain as Ethereum Classic.
That split made the incident an enduring reference point in arguments over “code is law” and the authority of social consensus to intervene in a blockchain.
The report also cited Core Network. It said approximately 97 million CORE staked through the b14g protocol were withdrawn without authorization on October 31. On November 2, Core Network announced a hard fork using a one-time state adjustment to recover 68,146,177.22 CORE from three attacker-controlled addresses—approximately 70.2% of the affected amount.
Golem argued that Polygon’s circumstances differed because Polymarket and Binance had already covered user losses, and the targeted POL represented less than 1% of circulating supply. The broader question remained unresolved at publication: whether recovering funds for ecosystem partners justified overriding the ownership rules those partners and their users normally rely on.
Source: Odaily report by Golem, published on PANews, November 5, 2026, 21:00 Beijing time (UTC+8). This account preserves the report’s pre-meeting context; no subsequent outcome is supplied.