Polygon proposal seeks hard fork to recover 70.49M POL
On November 4, 2026, Polygon's governance forum proposed a hard fork to recover 70.49 million POL from addresses blocked after the Polymarket and Binance incidents.
The proposal, scheduled for presentation at the Polygon Protocol Governance Call on November 5 at 14:30 UTC, would change account balances through consensus. It affects validators, RPC providers and anyone reconstructing balances from transactions. The recovery destinations belong to Polymarket and Binance, with no direct distribution to individual users through this fork.
Polymarket reported on October 30 that it had already reimbursed 95% of affected wallets in full, returning $3.9 million including $2.7 million plus $1.2M for pause-related losses. The company stated users needed no claims because it identified eligible wallets from on-chain and trading data.
Recovery targets
The proposal identifies four Polymarket-linked addresses and one Binance-linked address as Class A for recovery. At block 96,399,251 on October 29, the Polymarket addresses held a total of 23,862,736.07 POL. The Binance address held 46,626,593.27 POL at block 96,413,185 on the same date. These historical reference amounts do not fix the eventual fork's payout amounts.
The design is proposed and subject to confirmation by Bor engineering.
Technical implementation
At the activation block's start, the client would read each Class A address's balance from the preceding block's post-state, set it to zero, and add the same amount to the corresponding recovery address. Polymarket's destination is 0x3dcE0a29139A851Da1dFCa56Af8e8a6440b4D952; Binance's is 0xd9fd39103674cb061d64d9c3b73b878dbe610b80. Each company must prove control and confirm ownership before activation.
The proposal acknowledges that a wrongly classified Class A address would lose a legitimate balance. The fork's address list is closed, with cleanup of the block list to follow a separate process after activation. Activation requires governance approval, consistent postmortems, and continued enforcement of block lists until the fork takes effect.
Risks and safeguards
The authors identify recovery-wallet compromise and chain splits as risks. Safeguards include proof of control, written confirmation, publication of multisig signers, and a rehearsal using test accounts. The proposal rejects a general freeze-and-recover facility due to concerns about permanent power over user funds.
Anyone can send POL to listed addresses before activation, which would also move to recovery wallets. The proposal requires a fresh snapshot reading to account for this possibility. The rollout timeline estimates about two weeks after approval for client development and deployment, with validators expecting 70-80% stake to upgrade quickly.
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