Hacker Won't Hand Over Private Key, So Polygon Just Alters Balances? 70.49M POL Recovery Plan Sparks Governance Controversy

Author: TechFlow

TechFlow Guide: On November 5, 2026, Beijing Time, the Polygon community forum officially published a Protocol Improvement Proposal (PIP), which proposes a network-wide coordinated hard fork to reset the balances of approximately 70.49 million native POL tokens controlled by five attacker addresses linked to security breaches involving Polymarket and Binance, and transfer them fully to official recovery addresses designated by the victims. This major governance development marks another instance where a public blockchain ecosystem chooses to intervene in the underlying state machine through social consensus, after traditional blacklist mechanisms failed.

Blacklists Stuck in a Passive Defense Deadlock

The security incidents occurred between October 29 and 30, during which hackers transferred massive amounts of stolen POL assets to on-chain addresses on the Polygon PoS network. Upon receiving urgent notifications from affected institutions, network validator nodes quickly deployed temporary filtering rules within the consensus client Bor, blacklisting the involved addresses locally and temporarily cutting off the channels for funds to divert to external money laundering pathways.

This point-defense strategy exposes severe pain points in on-chain governance. Client-side blacklists can only unidirectionally intercept transfer broadcasts initiated by attacker addresses; they cannot forcibly revoke hackers' on-chain signing authority over private keys, nor can they return frozen assets to the victimized platforms. On-chain monitoring records show that during the restricted period, attackers frequently attempted to construct special interactive payloads to bypass the interception, meaning static blockades constantly face the risk of failing due to consensus node configuration issues.

Precise State-Layer Reconstruction and Asymmetric Transfer

To end this endless cycle of reactive maneuvering, the affected parties jointly submitted an official governance improvement proposal to the network. The core of the plan lies in bypassing conventional private key signing logic and directly executing a forced rewrite of the node state machine at a predetermined block height. This logic applies exclusively to five specific involved addresses, leaving unaffected the transaction history and smart contract execution logs of all third parties.

Technically, the code will force-balance-reset four Polymarket-linked attacker addresses (totaling approximately 23.86 million POL) and one Binance-linked attacker address (approximately 46.63 million POL) within the target block. In the same block, the system will credit equivalent amounts to cold wallets provided by the victim institutions. The entire execution process is tightly anchored to the native token state, ensuring the absolute constancy of the total POL supply across the network and avoiding accounting distortions caused by inflation or deflation.

Rethinking the Governance Boundaries of Code as Law

Remedial measures that directly modify ledger states inevitably trigger industry scrutiny regarding blockchain's traditional notion of "immutability." In 2016, Ethereum executed a hard fork rollback following The DAO incident, which once fractured community ideology and gave rise to Ethereum Classic. This Polygon proposal deliberately narrows its intervention radius in its mechanism design; rather than erasing historical data from already-confirmed transaction trees, it opts to correct targeted asset ownership within the current latest state snapshot.

The proposers explicitly state in the document that this technical intervention is an exceptional remedy under extremely low-probability security disasters and cannot be cited as a standard precedent for resolving routine on-chain disputes or commercial defaults. This balancing act between network determinism and recovering massive losses brings the core proposition of public chain governance back into focus: when consensus participants face systematic criminal infringement, social consensus holds the ultimate adjudicative power to override machine-coded logic.

Client Scheduling and Amoy Testnet Verification

According to the established timeline, the Polymarket and Binance teams will comprehensively present and defend the proposal's details at the Polygon official governance meeting at 14:30 UTC on November 5. If the proposal receives approval from the Core Dev Committee and universal validator consensus, the engineering team estimates it will take approximately two weeks to complete patch development for the Bor and Heimdall clients. Sandbox verification will first be conducted on the Amoy testnet, followed by the announcement of the specific block height for the mainnet hard fork upgrade at an opportune moment.