TLDR
- Polygon is considering a hard fork to move 70.49 million stolen POL, worth about $6.5 million.
- The funds came from separate Polymarket and Binance hacks on October 29 and 30.
- The proposal calls the current blocklist a stopgap that is not a complete freeze.
- The attacker offered validators cash and tried a 219,450 POL fee to move the funds.
- The plan goes before the Polygon Protocol Governance Call on November 5.
Polygon network operators are being asked to approve a hard fork that would move about 70.49 million POL out of five blocked attacker addresses. The tokens, worth about $6.5 million, were taken in separate hacks of Polymarket and Binance in late October.
The proposal was posted by a member of the Polygon Labs Validator Support Team. It argues that the current freeze on the funds is fragile and that the attacker is still trying to break it.
The Polymarket incident on October 29 involved a compromised third-party vendor script. It took about 28 million POL from active, logged-in trading sessions.
Validators blocked four addresses tied to that incident, holding about 23.86 million POL. One of those addresses had sent 3,282,275.71 POL to another address in two transfers.
Binance was hacked late on October 29 after an engineer’s laptop was compromised. In block 96,406,484, a Binance hot wallet sent 46,626,589.6 POL and 6,185,900.1 USDT to a single attacker address.
Tether has since frozen the USDT. That leaves the POL as the remaining balance at risk, and it stays on the blocklist.
Why the Current Freeze Falls Short
After the hacks, Polygon’s validator-elected block producers added the attacker addresses to Bor’s transaction blocklist. The list has stopped the funds from moving, and no bypass has been found so far.
However, the proposal describes the blocklist as a stopgap. Each block producer reads its list only at startup, so every change requires a deployment and a restart. Entries also have no automatic expiry.
The filter only covers outer senders and EIP-7702 authorities. That means it is not a complete asset freeze, according to the document.
The attacker has kept testing the system. On October 30, a pending transaction offered a fee of about 219,450 POL, or 10.45 POL per gas.
The attacker also contacted validators and offered cash payments for help unblocking a transaction. Polymarket separately opened an on-chain recovery channel through the SEAL Safe Harbor Recovery Safe but has received no response.
What the Hard Fork Would Do
The hard fork would set each blocked address balance to zero at a fixed block. The same amount would be credited to recovery wallets designated and verified by Polymarket and Binance.
POL’s total supply would not change. Heimdall, the StakeManager and the bridge contracts would also stay the same, according to the proposal.
Polymarket and Binance must prove control of their recovery addresses before activation. This could be done with a signed message or a small test transfer confirmed by Polygon Labs.
The proposal rejects building a general freeze-and-recover tool, calling it a permanent power over user funds. It describes this fork as an extreme action that should not be repeated commonly.
All validators, RPC providers, exchanges and node operators would need to upgrade their Bor clients before the activation block. Nodes that do not upgrade would follow a different chain.
Polygon validator operations expects about 70% to 80% of stake to reach the required version quickly after release. Other Binance addresses, labeled Class B, would not be touched by the fork.
The proposal is scheduled for presentation at the Polygon Protocol Governance Call on November 5 at 14:30 UTC. If approved, client development and testing on the Amoy testnet are expected to take about two weeks.
