Binance and Polymarket Propose Polygon Hard Fork To Recover About $6,500,000 in Hacked Crypto

Crypto exchange giant Binance and prediction markets platform Polymarket want the Polygon (POL) network to move about 70 million tokens out of the hands of the hackers who stole them late last month.

The two firms have filed a Polygon Improvement Proposal for a one-time hard fork that would set the POL balances in five attacker-controlled addresses to zero and credit the same amounts to recovery wallets the companies control, the proposal says.

The five addresses hold about 70.49 million POL, worth roughly $6.5 million at the October 29th price used in the proposal.

About 23.86 million POL sits in four addresses tied to the Polymarket hack on October 29th, while about 46.63 million POL sits in one address tied to the Binance hack that hit late the same day.

Polygon’s block producers have already added the addresses to a block list, so the funds cannot move.

But the companies say that is only a stopgap.

“The funds cannot move, but nothing in the current setup lets them be returned either.”

The proposal says the attacker has kept trying to get the funds out, including by offering validators cash to help unblock a transaction.

The fork would leave Polygon’s total supply unchanged.

It would only go live after approval through Polygon’s governance process, a test run on the Amoy testnet and proof that Binance and Polymarket control the recovery wallets.

The firms call it an extreme action that should not be reproduced commonly.

The plan is set to be presented at the Polygon Protocol Governance Call on November 5th at 14:30 UTC, with rollout expected to take about two weeks after approval.

Binance says it has already replaced most of the roughly $6.3 billion stolen from its hot wallets in the October 29th attack.

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