Polygon is considering a hard fork to recover $6.8 million in cryptocurrency stolen in separate security incidents involving Binance and Polymarket, according to a report by BitcoinKE.

The proposal seeks to transfer 70.49 million POL — the native token of Polygon, an Ethereum scaling network — from five attacker-controlled addresses to verified recovery wallets.

Key developments in the recovery effort:

• Binance and Polymarket have identified the affected funds and proposed recovery wallets.
• Polygon block producers have already blocked transactions from the addresses, preventing the funds from moving.
• The proposed hard fork would allow the network to transfer the assets without the attackers' private keys.
• The intervention would not change POL's total supply.
• Polygon's governance process must approve the proposal before implementation.

Under normal blockchain rules, the contents of an address can only be moved by whoever controls its private keys. The block producers' freeze can stop the stolen funds from circulating, but it cannot relocate them; the fork is the step that would actually move the POL to the recovery wallets, which is also why the plan requires network-wide coordination rather than action by any single participant.

The proposal is scheduled for discussion at the Polygon Protocol Governance Call on November 5, with implementation expected to take approximately two weeks if approved. The governance decision is the next checkpoint for the recovery effort: without it, the funds would remain frozen in place.

A hard fork is a permanent, non-backward-compatible change to a blockchain's underlying protocol rules that splits the network into two separate, parallel blockchains.

Network-level interventions of this kind are rare. The best-known precedent is Ethereum's 2016 hard fork following the DAO hack, which reversed a major theft and split the blockchain, with the original chain continuing as Ethereum Classic. That episode framed a debate that has persisted since: reversing major thefts can protect users, but doing so by rewriting chain history cuts against the immutability that blockchains are typically relied on for.

The recovery effort raises broader questions about blockchain governance, decentralisation and whether networks should intervene to reverse the effects of major security breaches.

Source: BitcoinKE — Polygon Considers Hard Fork to Recover ~$7 Million in Stolen Crypto