France's National Gambling Authority has taken decisive action against the Polymarket platform, ordering local internet service providers to completely block access to it. The regulator has equated prediction markets to illegal gambling, effectively ending the service's operations in the country. Although geo-blocking of transactions had been in place since 2024, users actively circumvented the restrictions: in June of this year, the platform was visited by over 205,000 unique French users, indicating high demand for such tools.
The regulator is particularly concerned about the risk of manipulating event outcomes. Since May, the Paris Prosecutor's Office has been investigating suspected hacking of weather sensors to gain an advantage in weather-related bets. This is the first documented case where technical means, rather than mere information leaks, were used to influence prediction markets. Such incidents undermine trust in decentralized platforms and call into question their ability to ensure the integrity of forecasts.
As of today, Polymarket is already blocked in 36 jurisdictions worldwide, including Singapore, Poland, Ukraine, and Brazil. This points to a global trend: regulators are increasingly cracking down on prediction markets, viewing them as gray areas between finance, gambling, and information services. In my professional opinion, Polymarket faces a fundamental problem: its business model, built on pseudo-anonymity and cryptocurrency transactions, is poorly compatible with the existing legal frameworks of most countries. Without significant changes in approaches to KYC and event verification, the platform risks remaining merely a niche tool for tech-savvy users rather than a mass-market product.