It's easy to attack, it's easy to deal with. Head
By Chloe, Challenger
Last week, the forecast market went out in India. The user links to polymark.com and only sees "This site can't be read". The Ministry of Electronic Information Technology (MeitY) of India has issued a blockade order against it, requesting Internet service providers in India to cut off access on the grounds that India has classified the platform as a “line money game”, which is a completely prohibited category。
And just the same day, Bloomberg quoted informed sources that Polymarket had appointed local representatives in Japan and was in the process of lobbying for “predict the legalization of the market”, with the goal of obtaining approval by the Japanese Government by 2030。
Pollymarket’s situation is described in a precise way, and today’s market size is projected to grow, but countries’ regulatory challenges make it difficult。
Three regulatory pathways reveal how countries view the existence of a predictive platform
Polymarket’s expansion has spread virally to countries because of its “permissionless” approach, a decentralised structure that reaches about 180 countries, but that is what national regulators see as a problem. The absence of identification means circumventing anti-money-laundering (AML) norms; the absence of traditional financial institutions means circumventing the regulation of game licences and derivatives。
By the beginning of 2026, the number of restricted countries and areas listed in the Polymucket's own document was about 33, spanning six continents and growing every month or two. In terms of regulatory action by countries, there are a number of types。
The first is a direct blockade。
INDIA IS THE LATEST AND MOST DRAMATIC CASE. IT IS BASED ON THE LAW ON THE PROMOTION AND MANAGEMENT OF ONLINE GAME (PROGA) 2025, WHICH WAS ADOPTED BY BOTH HOUSES OF CONGRESS IN AUGUST 2025 AND SIGNED BY THE PRESIDENT AND ENTERED INTO FORCE ON 1 MAY 2026, AND WHICH INCLUDES THE FORECAST MARKET TOGETHER WITH ONLINE MONEY GAME AS A TOTAL BAN。
It is worth noting that the implementation of the embargo is not at all clean. Polymarket and its competitor, Kalshi, did not retreat quietly after the ban came into effect, but instead continued to register transactions with Indian users through the Mirror Station (a copy of the same content as the original site but of a different server). On April 25, the Ministry of Electronic Information Technology of India sent a letter to VPN operators warning users that they were still visiting “illegal and blocked prognosis markets and online gaming platforms”, but that the warning was still unstoppable. Polymarket did not really turn off the lights in India until the blockade that formally invoked section 69A of the Information Technology Act landed。
Even so, India remains one of Polymarket’s largest user bases, and it is illegal for people to continue to use VPN to bypass the ISP through encrypted currency channels outside the country, simply visiting or investing in India。
The blockade in Brazil is even more aggressive. At the end of April 2026, the National Monetary Commission of Brazil (CMN) issued Resolution No. 5,298 prohibiting derivatives contracts based on non-economic events (movements, politics, elections, culture, entertainment), blocking at one time some 27 to 28 predictive platforms, including Polymarket and Kalshi, and closing domain names by the telecommunications regulator Anatel。
Dario Durigan, an official of the Ministry of Finance, described these platforms as “a gamble disguised as a financial instrument” and attributed the rise in household debt to unregulated online games in part. As a result, Brazil became the third Latin American country to limit the forecast market after Argentina and Colombia。
Ukraine's ban carries special ethical considerations. In December 2025, Ukraine imposed a national blockade on the grounds that the platform had accepted bets on events related to the war between Russia and Ukraine. In November 2025 alone, 97 Russian-Uu war-related bets were placed on the platform, totalling $96.8 million. A bet in an ongoing war on the time of the fall of the city is an intolerable reason for regulators。
The second is a combination of established license plates and derivative norms。
Europe is the rallying ground for such a fight. Although the EU has a MiCA encrypted asset framework, it does not have clear rules for a dualist event contract, so each member State invokes its own game and financial laws。
The French National Game Authority (ANJ) has identified Polymarket as an unlicensed operator, and the platform has therefore changed the French IP model to a “view-only” model in which users can only look at the market but cannot trade; the Portuguese SriJ issued a national ban in early 2026 on the grounds that the betting of political events was inherently illegal; and the Dutch Game Authority (KSA) issued a disciplinary order in January against Polymark calling for a four-week suspension, otherwise a weekly fine of Euro420,000 and a ceiling of Euro840,000; and Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, Hungary, each included it on the embargo or blacklist。
In the United Kingdom, there is a double obstacle because, without British game licences, and with the Financial Conduct Regulatory Authority (FCA) prohibiting the sale of encrypted derivatives to the diaspora, Polymarket has simply taken the initiative to block all British residents geographically. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has investigated and determined that the projected market is a game without licence and has required the ISP to impose a full embargo under the 2001 Interactive Game Act。
The third is the intermediate route, i.e. the establishment of a separate framework for its institutionalization。
Brazil is the most typical “one-sided”: it has banned offshore platforms that decentre, open to the general public, open to movements and political events (i.e. Polymarket, Kalshi), but it has not swept out the entire product category, but has been turned back by the securities regulator CVM, which authorized the local B3 Exchange to launch regulated dual-incident derivatives, with initial targets locking in dollars, Ibovespa indices, bitcoons, etc., and only to professional investors whose financial assets exceed R$10 million。
In other words, what Brazil wants is not to eliminate this product, but to take it back from offshore casinos, repackaging it into its own securities system and selling it only to affordable financial carriers。
DUBAI IS TAKING ANOTHER “THRESHOLD” APPROACH. IT DOES NOT IMPOSE A BAN ON WHOM, BUT RATHER ESTABLISHES A CLEAR LICENSING SYSTEM THROUGH THE VIRTUAL ASSETS CONTROL AUTHORITY (VARA), WHEREBY ANY OPERATOR WHO WISHES TO LEGALLY PROVIDE SERVICES TO THE LOCAL POPULATION MUST FIRST OBTAIN A VASP LICENCE AND ADOPT STRICT OPERATIONAL AUDITING AND ANTI-MONEY-LAUNDERING CONTROLS。
The common denominator between these two approaches is not to treat the forecast market as a mere gamble, but rather to demand that it be removed from its central coat and replaced with a regulated identity。
Polymarket has a strategy for focused markets
For priority markets, such as the United States, Japan, the expansion of Polymarket could be described as a pragmatic, country-to-country negotiation approach。
In the United States, Polymarket is following the route of paying back legal identity. In 2022, it was fined $1.4 million by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), expelled from the United States market and returned to fill in its licence plates. In July 2025, it acquired $112 million for a derivative exchange with a CFTC licence and the liquidation holding company QCEX, which paved the way for compliance re-entry。
In November of the same year, CFTC was officially released and allowed to operate as a regulated intermediary platform. But the price is that U.S. users can no longer use anonymous decentrized wallets, have to go through the “Polymark US” entrance, through strict KYC, and approved brokers, to say that Polymarkett bought his legal identity in exchange for giving up anonymity and decentrization。
This was followed by the introduction of capital into the system. In October 2025, the New York office (ICE) announced a maximum investment of $2 billion for Polymarket and a post-investment valuation of about $9 billion. ICE, however, sees the platform as an event probability signal from mass trading and will be the sole distributor of these data to global institutional investors. For Polymarket, the most valuable thing is to sell into Wall Street's data pipeline。
Back in Asia, in Japan, it's another boost. Polymarket has appointed a local representative in Japan and is in the process of lobbying for “predict the legalization of the market”, led by Mike Eidlin, who is currently the Japanese director of the Solana EcodeFi project Jupiter。
Polymarket looks at this big piece of Japanese cake, and there is evidence of this. By June 2025, Japan’s chain value had grown 120% annually, the fastest growing market in the entire Asia-Pacific region; together with Japan’s already strong speculative trading culture, ranging from foreign exchange, horse racing, and pachinko, a “rich-dealing” market。
But the game is legally a huge minefield in the country. The Criminal Code of Japan provides for a maximum penalty of three years ' imprisonment for customary gambling and up to five years for gambling operations, with the exception of a few government-authorized race horses and public lottery tickets. Even the pachinko industry, which is about 16 trillion yen (about $100 billion), circumvents the gambling ban by converse design to "pay money for another store"。
In such an environment, there is currently no clear legal category for predicting markets. That's why Polymarket set his target at 2030. In particular, the regulatory process in Japan is well known for its extreme caution, and any new product categories involving the DeFi infrastructure and the encrypted mortgage market are often reviewed on a yearly basis。
According to sources, Polymarket intends to work with Japanese institutions and businesses for several years to develop an extended framework, which has been positioned as a long-term institutional project, rather than an opportunistic advance. While awaiting approval, it has chosen to pave the way for community operations: Polymarket’s Japanese X account has accumulated over 53,000 people of concern, maintaining a sense of presence by sharing information。
ONE INDUSTRIAL ACTIVIST DESCRIBED JAPAN AS ENTERING A PHASE IN WHICH “FORECASTING DATA COULD BECOME A VALUABLE NEW LAYER IN THE FINANCIAL AND MEDIA INFRASTRUCTURE”, ALMOST A REPLICA OF THE ICE BUSINESS MODEL IN JAPAN。
Concluding remarks
Pulling the camera away from Polymarket will reveal that this "easy, difficult" saw is taking place on the scale of the entire industry and is increasingly betting。
Despite the judicial and compliance risks, the overall trading scale of the market is projected to grow in an explosive manner。According to a study by Bernstein, the global forecast of market transactions reached $51 billion last year, and is expected to climb to $240 billion in 2026, with the prospect of breaking the $1 trillion mark in 2030。
Such platforms are evolving from petty gambling to a vast information market across finance, geopolitics and macroeconomics. But regardless of the scale, Polymarket faces the same problem in each market: how to embed a decentralized, licensing and consumer protection-based regulatory system。
For predicting markets, the real level is never to be large, but to prove itself qualified to stay in every regulatory, political corner。
