Polygon Community Moves to Recover Stolen Funds Through Proposed Hard Fork
A newly revealed Polygon Improvement Proposal (PIP) outlines an urgent plan to address a significant theft of native assets. The core of the proposal involves executing a scheduled hard fork on the Polygon Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mainnet to target addresses associated with a prior attack that have been placed on a blocklist.
Scope of Assets and Technical Approach
The plan calls for zeroing out approximately 70.49 million native POL tokens held in the attacker's addresses and transferring them to a designated community-controlled recovery address. Based on a price of around $0.0924 per POL on October 29th, the total value of the assets in question is approximately $6.5 million.
The distribution of the affected assets is broken down as follows:
- Roughly 23.86 million POL are linked to the prediction market platform Polymarket.
- Approximately 46.63 million POL are associated with the cryptocurrency exchange Binance.
Importantly, the proposal is designed to keep the total supply of POL tokens unchanged, preventing any unintended impact on the token's economic model through minting or burning.
Governance Process and Next Steps
This proposal is scheduled to be formally introduced and discussed during a protocol governance meeting at 22:30 Beijing Time on November 5th. Community members will review the plan's feasibility, security implications, and execution details.
The specific block height for activating the hard fork and the required client version updates have not yet been finalized. These technical parameters are pending community consensus following the governance discussion. This situation highlights the ongoing challenge of balancing decentralized governance with technical intervention in response to security incidents on blockchain networks.