A proposal to recover stolen POL put a familiar crypto principle under pressure: should a network override control of an address to reverse a theft?
In a report published on November 5, 2026, at 13:36 Beijing time (UTC+8), Odaily’s Golem described a proposal from Polymarket and Binance asking Polygon to do exactly that. The dispute concerned more than recovering funds: it tested what immutability should mean when victims have already been compensated and stolen assets remain frozen.
What the proposal would change
According to the report, Polymarket and Binance proposed a Polygon PoS mainnet hard fork that would zero out approximately 70.49 million POL held in attacker addresses and credit equivalent balances to recovery addresses they designated. The offsetting changes would leave POL’s total supply unchanged.
The article initially valued the assets at approximately $6.7 million, but later used approximately $6.5 million.
The proposal followed two security incidents on October 30, involving Polymarket’s frontend and a Binance hot wallet. Polygon validators froze:
- Four addresses associated with the Polymarket attack, holding 23.86 million POL.
- One address associated with the Binance attack, holding 46.63 million POL.
Those freezes prevented the attackers from moving the assets, according to Odaily. Polymarket sought cooperation from the attacker but received no response. The proposal also alleged that an attacker contacted Polygon validators and offered cash in exchange for unfreezing addresses.
Golem reported that concern about validators accepting such offers helped motivate the joint recovery proposal. The teams were scheduled to present their case at the Polygon Protocol Governance Call, or PPGC, at 22:30 Beijing time on November 5. The supplied article was published before that meeting and reported no decision.
Freezing an address is not the same as rewriting its balance
The central distinction in Golem’s analysis was between restricting transactions and transferring funds without a private-key signature.
A freeze prevents an address from transacting without changing its balance or ownership. The proposed hard fork would go further: the protocol itself would remove a balance from one address and assign it elsewhere, without the holder’s signature.
For crypto communities, that raises a question beyond this particular theft: if governance can override key-based control in one case, what limits would govern the next?
Polymarket and Binance emphasized that their proposal applied only to the specified addresses involved in these two incidents. They said it should not become a routine procedure or establish a general Polygon mechanism for freezing and recovering assets.
Golem nevertheless argued that an exception could encourage other projects to demand similar intervention. The author also noted that both companies had already fully compensated affected users from their own funds. In that framing, the fork would recover the companies’ losses rather than provide outstanding user compensation.
Earlier forks show the social cost
The report compared the proposal with two earlier interventions.
In 2016, the exploitation of The DAO resulted in the theft of approximately 3.6 million ETH, worth more than $50 million at the time and described in the article as roughly 14% of the then-existing ETH supply. Ethereum’s hard fork moved the affected funds into a refund contract. Opposition to that intervention helped produce Ethereum Classic, making the episode a lasting reference point in debates over “code is law” and social intervention.
The second comparison was Core Network. Following the unauthorized withdrawal of approximately 97 million CORE staked through the b14g protocol on October 31, Core Network announced a hard fork on November 2. A one-time state adjustment recovered 68,146,177.22 CORE from three attacker-controlled addresses—approximately 70.2% of the affected amount.
Golem argued that Polygon’s situation differed because Polymarket and Binance could absorb the losses and had already reimbursed users. The author also noted that the disputed POL represented less than 1% of circulating supply, assessing its potential network impact as limited.
An unresolved test of trust
At publication, Odaily reported no public position from Polygon’s official channels, relevant PPGC participants or core developers. Golem considered approval unlikely, arguing that the reputational risk to Polygon outweighed the benefits of helping two ecosystem partners recover funds.
The author also explicitly allowed for the opposite outcome: Polygon might make an exception because of its friendly relationship with Polymarket and Binance’s influence. That was speculation, not a reported governance result.
The unresolved issue was whether a narrowly described recovery could remain an exception—or become a precedent that changed how participants understood control over their assets.