Polygon wants to move 70 million POL without the wallet holders’ signatures

Polygon's proposed recovery of roughly 70 million POL would move coins out of five hack-linked wallets without their holders signing a transfer. The plan would change balances through the network's rules, putting the authority to return stolen funds in the hands of governance and validators.

The November 4 proposal targets five addresses it links to stolen funds from security incidents affecting prediction market Polymarket and exchange Binance. Its dated reference tables attribute about 24 million POL to four Polymarket-linked addresses and 47 million POL to one Binance-linked address. The actual recovery would use balances at activation, not these dated reference amounts.

As of November 9, the published proposal still leaves the recovery fork's name, client release and activation block undecided. The November 5 governance agenda lists the proposal for discussion without recording approval. The separate Bor v2.11.0 release implements Uburu's StateReceiver changes, rather than this proposed recovery.

Under the proposed design, the upgraded software would read each listed address's balance immediately before activation, set it to zero and credit the same amount to the designated recovery address. This would happen before transactions execute in the activation block. Total supply would stay the same, and earlier chain history would remain intact. The proposal says Bor engineering must still confirm the design.

That would place recovery authority in a combination of governance approval, the specified address list and the software rule validators adopt. The affected companies would designate the recipients. Polygon Labs would confirm the proposed proof of recipient control. The proposed sweep would not require a transaction signed by the source addresses.