I’m reaching out with a difficult situation and genuinely hoping someone here — or from the Polygon team — might be able to point me in the right direction.
I’m the developer behind a DeFi staking protocol that was deployed on Ethereum. Due to a configuration mistake on my part during a contract migration, a very large amount of MATIC tokens (in the millions) is now permanently locked in a smart contract with no programmatic way for me to recover it.
What happened (briefly): The migration involved deploying a new contract (Contract B) that was meant to take ownership of and manage the original staking contract (Contract A). Due to a constructor misconfiguration, Contract B ended up with a broken reference to Contract A — meaning although Contract B is the rightful owner of Contract A on-chain, it has no functional way to call Contract A’s withdrawal or ownership functions. The funds are stuck.
Why I’m posting here: I’m aware that MATIC has migrated to POL, and that POL has a mint function controlled by the Polygon team. I understand this is an unconventional ask, and I want to be clear — I’m not requesting any protocol-level change or anything that would affect other users. I’m simply wondering whether the Polygon Foundation or any governance mechanism exists that could help in a situation like this, perhaps through an equivalent token issuance or some other path I haven’t considered.
I want to be fully transparent: I take complete responsibility for this mistake. This was a human error during deployment, not a hack or exploit. I have full proof of ownership of the deployer wallet and all relevant contracts.
As a gesture of goodwill, I would be happy to donate 50% of any recovered amount to a charity or public goods fund of the Polygon team’s choosing.
I’m not expecting a miracle — I just want to exhaust every possible avenue before accepting the loss. If anyone has faced something similar or knows the right person to speak to, I’d be deeply grateful.
Thank you for reading.