Polygon Plans Hard Fork to Seize $6.5 Million From Polymarket and Binance Hackers
Polygon developers have proposed a radical hard fork to forcibly zero out the wallets of hackers who stole 70.49 million POL tokens, valued at $6.5 million, from Binance and Polymarket.
The proposal marks a significant departure from the core principle of blockchain immutability, which dictates that transactions cannot be reversed. Polygon developers are asking the community to approve a hard fork that would alter the network's consensus rules to seize the stolen funds and return them to the victims.
The crisis began at the end of October, when two independent hacks resulted in the theft of assets scattered across five wallets. Specifically, 23.86 million POL were taken from Polymarket, and 46.63 million from Binance. Validators immediately blacklisted the addresses to stop the outflow, but the developers acknowledge this as only a temporary measure.
The hackers have not been deterred. They are continuously bombarding the network with transactions carrying fees as high as 219,000 POL, hoping to exploit a validator's weakness for easy profit. The material reports direct attempts to bribe validators with cash, while the hackers have ignored on-chain negotiations.
The proposed fork mechanism
Since no one has access to the hackers' private keys, Polygon is changing the consensus rules themselves. At a specific block height, the hackers' balances will be forcibly zeroed out, and an equivalent amount will be mirror-credited to verified Binance and Polymarket wallets without any token printing.
This plan inevitably triggers a strong déjà vu of the legendary The DAO hard fork of 2016.
Polygon Labs is well aware that such an administrative step completely negates the idea of decentralization. The developers hope that consensus among validators is already rock-solid, so they are positioning the fork as an exclusively one-time action to minimize the precedent.
Community vote and next steps
The fate of the millions is being decided in a community vote. The largest validators are already in favor, as both platforms are critically important to Polygon's survival. If the plan is approved, the software will be released after two weeks of testing.
Exchanges and node operators will have to urgently update to the new code. Those who refuse to switch to the new branch will face automatic isolation from the main network, with no connection to the rest of the Polygon blockchain.
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