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Polygon developers have taken a step that has long been considered an absolute taboo in the crypto community. They put to a vote a plan to rescue Binance and Polymarket money, and this plan is, to put it mildly, radical — forcibly zeroing out the hackers’ wallets at the protocol level. In essence, the industry is being faced with an uncomfortable choice: save systemic players or protect the inviolability of Web3’s main rule that transactions cannot be reversed. The Polygon PoS hard fork involves seizing 70.49 million POL tokens ($6.5 million at the time of the attack) from the hacker addresses to return them to the victims.
The crisis unfolded at the end of October after two independent hacks. The stolen assets were scattered across five wallets (23.86 million POL was taken from Polymarket, 46.63 million from Binance). Validators immediately blacklisted the addresses, cutting off the outflow, but this is just an attempt to hold back the dam with bare hands. Manual blocking is a temporary plug, and the authors of the proposal openly admit it.
The hacker is not giving up. He is continuously bombarding the network with transactions carrying wild fees of up to 219,000 POL, counting on automation or a validator with a weakness for easy money to let the operation through for a windfall profit. Things have gone as far as direct attempts to bribe validators with cash, while the hacker simply ignored on-chain negotiations. The developers’ logic is simple: keeping millions in a manual “ban” forever is a dead end that leaves the entire network under constant fire.
The fork recipe: take and redistribute
It’s clear that no one has access to the hacker’s private keys, so Polygon is changing the consensus rules themselves. At a certain block, 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.
Polygon Labs is well aware that such an administrative step completely negates the very idea of decentralization.
This plan inevitably triggers a strong déjà vu of the legendary The DAO hard fork of 2016. Back then, to save the young Ethereum ecosystem, developers also had to go through a painful split of the community and spit on the “Code is Law” principle. But Polygon Labs hopes that in their case consensus among validators is already rock-solid, so they are narrowing the framework of the precedent as much as possible, positioning the fork as an exclusively one-time action.
The fate of the millions is being decided right now in a community vote. The largest validators are already in favor, since both platforms are critically important to Polygon’s survival. If the plan is approved, the software will be released after two weeks of testing, and exchanges and node operators will have to urgently update. Those who refuse to switch to the new code face automatic isolation on the old branch of the blockchain — with no connection to the main network.