Source report published November 5, 2026, at 13:36:06 UTC+8. This article reflects the proposal and information reported at that time, not a confirmed governance outcome.
The proposal: change balances without private-key signatures
A hard-fork proposal from Polymarket and Binance put a fundamental governance question before Polygon: should a network do more than freeze stolen assets and directly reassign them through a protocol-level state change?
According to Odaily’s report by Golem, the November 5 proposal sought to remove approximately 70.49 million POL from attacker-controlled addresses on Polygon PoS and credit equivalent balances to recovery addresses designated by Polymarket and Binance. The paired adjustments would leave POL’s total supply unchanged.
The report initially valued the assets at approximately $6.7 million, but later cited approximately $6.5 million. It did not reconcile those estimates.
Polymarket and Binance were scheduled to discuss the proposal at a Polygon Protocol Governance Call, or PPGC, at 22:30 Beijing time on November 5. At publication, Odaily reported no public position from Polygon’s official representatives, relevant PPGC participants or core developers.
Why freezing the assets had not resolved the incidents
The proposal followed two security incidents on October 30. Odaily reported that Polymarket’s frontend and a Binance hot wallet were compromised around the same time. Polygon validators subsequently froze:
- Four addresses associated with the Polymarket attack, containing 23.86 million POL.
- One address associated with the Binance attack, containing 46.63 million POL.
Those restrictions prevented the attackers from moving the affected assets, but did not return them to the platforms. Polymarket reportedly sought the attacker’s cooperation without receiving a response.
According to the proposal as described by Odaily, the attacker also contacted Polygon validators and offered cash payments in exchange for unfreezing the addresses. The report presented concern about validators accepting such offers as a reason for pursuing a hard-fork recovery.
Both Polymarket and Binance had already fully compensated affected users from their own funds, according to Odaily. The proposed recovery would therefore address losses already absorbed by the platforms rather than an outstanding user reimbursement gap.
The technical boundary: restricting transfers versus rewriting balances
The distinction is not merely procedural.
An address freeze restricts the ability to transact while leaving its recorded balance in place. The proposed fork would instead change the ledger state directly: reduce balances at specified addresses to zero and credit the corresponding amounts elsewhere, without signatures from the private keys controlling the debited addresses.
That would make recovery possible through protocol governance rather than through the existing holders’ authorization. It would also make the credibility of ownership rules depend, in this instance, on a collective decision to override them.
Polymarket and Binance emphasized that the measure would apply only to the addresses involved in these two incidents. They said it should neither become routine nor establish a general Polygon mechanism for freezing and recovering assets.
Odaily’s analysis questioned whether that limitation would contain the precedent. Even a narrowly defined intervention could give other projects grounds to seek comparable treatment after future attacks. This is a governance concern raised by the author, not evidence that Polygon had adopted such a policy.
Historical comparisons—and their limits
The report discussed two previous recovery forks. Its earlier assertion that this kind of intervention had no precedent is therefore too broad; the substantive question is whether those precedents justify this particular proposal.
Ethereum and The DAO
Odaily cited the 2016 exploitation of The DAO, reporting approximately 3.6 million ETH stolen, worth more than $50 million at the time. It also described that amount as roughly 14% of ETH’s then-total supply; that percentage is a claim in the supplied article and is not independently established here.
Ethereum’s community ultimately used a hard fork to move affected funds into a refund contract. Opposition to the intervention contributed to the continuation of the original chain as Ethereum Classic (ETC). The episode illustrates that a technically successful recovery can still produce a lasting disagreement over which rules a network should uphold.
Core Network
The report also described an October 31 incident involving the unauthorized withdrawal of approximately 97 million CORE staked through the b14g protocol.
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. Odaily characterized that mechanism as broadly similar to the proposed Polygon intervention.
The author argued that both historical cases involved projects unable to cover the losses and incidents with substantial network consequences. That comparison is the source’s interpretation, rather than an independently verified assessment of each project’s financial capacity.
What the proposal would test
Odaily judged approval unlikely, arguing that Polygon would bear a reputational cost while the immediate financial recovery would accrue to Polymarket and Binance.
The report stated that the 70.49 million POL represented less than 1% of circulating supply. It further argued that even a complete attacker sale would have little material effect on POL’s price, staking, gas fees or the broader ecosystem. No market-impact model or supporting dataset was supplied, so those impact claims should be treated as the author’s assessment, not measured findings.
The report nevertheless acknowledged that Polymarket’s relationship with Polygon and Binance’s industry influence could make an exception possible.
At the reporting cutoff, the unresolved issue was therefore not whether protocol rules could be changed to recover assets, but whether this recovery justified doing so. The supplied article contains no subsequent governance decision or execution result.