The rapid collapse of a polymer, due to external forces or changes in solvent, yields a long-lived "crumpled globule." The conjectured fractal structure shaped by hierarchical collapse dynamics has proved difficult to establish, even with large simulations. To unravel this puzzle, we study a coarse-grained model of in-falling spherical blobs that coalesce upon contact. Distances between pairs of monomers are assigned upon their initial coalescence, and do not "equilibrate" subsequently. Surprisingly, the model reproduces quantitatively the dependence of distance on segment length, suggesting that the slow approach to scaling is related to the wide distribution of blob sizes. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.088303 PACS numbers: 82.35.-x, 68.43.Jk, 82.35.Pq The rapid collapse of a polymer into a dense globule is a long-standing problem [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Such a collapse may be triggered by changes in solvent quality, causing the polymer to reduce its solvent-exposed surface area by forming a dense globule. A polymer may also be condensed by active forces, as in the rearrangement of DNA by proteins in the cell nucleus [2]. The rapid collapse does not allow sufficient time for formation of topological entanglements, which abound in an equilibrated compact globule [1][2][3][4]6,13]. It is suggested [1] that during collapse segments of the polymer initially condense to spherelike "blobs," which coarsen upon contact to form larger blobs. At any given time during the process the state is then assumed to be characterized by a single length scale [1,[7][8][9], e.g., the typical size of the blobs or the width of the tube connecting the blobs [see, e.g., Fig. 1(a) [14]]. A central assumption is that when two blobs coalesce they remain more or less segregated within the newly formed structure. This is due to the slow relaxation processes within blobs, and due to topological constraints that prevent polymer segments forming the blobs from freely mixing-unlike a melt of independent polymer segments with open ends [1,[15][16][17][18][19][20]. The final configuration is thus predicted to be a constant density, self-similar, hierarchical structure, known as the "crumpled globule" or "fractal globule" [1-6,11]. The end-to-end distance r m of segments of length m in the resulting globule is predicted to scale as r m ∼ m 1=d in d space dimensions (throughout the Letter d ¼ 3). This is in contrast to the equilibrium state reached at much later times [10], where r m ∼ m 1=2 for small m, saturating at the globule size r max ¼ N 1=d , where N is the length of the polymer [21].These predictions have been tested in several simulations of polymer compaction [2,[4][5][6]11], which generally confirm that the rapidly collapsed state is not entangled, and is indeed different from the equilibrium globule. However, they do not agree upon its fractal nature. In particular, the expected scaling r m ∼ m 1=d has not been conclusively confirmed, even with the largest size simulations (recently extended to polymers of up to 250 ...