- Binance and Polymarket have proposed a Polygon network hard fork to recover 70.49 million POL tokens worth approximately $6.8 million, stolen in separate security incidents.
- The plan involves moving the stolen tokens from five attacker-controlled wallets to verified recovery wallets without changing the total supply of POL.
- The proposal needs governance approval and testing before implementation. It was scheduled for discussion on November 5, but no date has been confirmed for the mainnet hard fork.
Cryptocurrency exchange Binance and prediction market platform Polymarket have proposed a large-scale change to the Polygon network to recover around $6.8 million in stolen cryptocurrency. The proposal calls for a hard fork to be carried out so that the network can remove 70.49 million POL tokens from the five wallets owned by the attackers and send them into recovery wallets.
The proposal outlines how the recovery will be conducted in the form of two different events. Approximately 23.86 million POL tokens (worth around $2.31 million, are linked to the Polymarket security incident. Another 46.63 million POL tokens, valued at around $4.51 million) are held in the wallet associated with the Binance hack.
The proposed change would happen at a specific block on the Polygon network whereby the tokens would be sent to verified wallets specified by both Binance and Polymarket. There would be no change to POL token supply.
Polygon Have Restricted The Wallets Already
Polygon block producers have already restricted any transactions from taking place on the five addresses. This means any movement of the stolen tokens by the attackers is prevented.
However, this is a temporary restriction and does not actually return any funds to those they belong to. The proposed hard fork aims to take things further by sending the tokens into recovery wallets.
Hard forks involve a large scale change to a blockchains rules. In this instance it would allow the network to conduct a specific recovery. However, there are concerns over decentralisation and whether a blockchain should be modified to reverse a security breach.
Proposal Needs To Be Approved
The proposal is subject to approval from Polygon’s governance process. It will need to go through testing on the Amoy testnet before being implemented on the mainnet. The proposal has been scheduled for discussion on November 5 however there is currently no confirmed date for the hard fork to occur on the mainnet.
This comes after the $6.3 billion hack suffered by Binance on October 29. Polymarket also suffered a security incident whereby their third party service provider was compromised and trading was temporarily halted.
The proposed recovery shows how much harder it is becoming for crypto platforms to protect customer funds. Whilst the recovery of stolen assets seems like a good thing to do, altering blockchain data/ rules can cause some complex issues when it comes to governing the network.
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