France\u2019s gambling regulator has called on internet service providers to block Polymarket.<\/p>\n
The order<\/a> from the Autorit\u00e9 Nationale des Jeux<\/a> (ANJ), issued last week and flagged in a report<\/a> Saturday (July 18) by CoinDesk, argues that the prediction market and others like it are illegal gambling sites.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause some of their addictive features are similar to those of regulated gambling offerings \u2014 but are amplified by the absence of the protective mechanisms found in the legal gambling market \u2014 the ANJ urged users to exercise caution,\u201d the regulator said.<\/p>\n \u201cSome of the bets offered on this platform appeared to be rigged: for example, bets on the weather revealed that weather sensors may have been hacked.\u201d<\/p>\n The ANJ added that an investigation into this matter was launched in May and found an absence of know your customer<\/a> (KYC) controls on Polymarket platforms available to French and European users.<\/p>\n The regulator said past restrictions had not kept French users from using Polymarket. The platform saw 578,751 visits from 205,057 unique visitors in France last month, the ANJ said, citing data from Similarweb. This was despite a prohibition on financial transactions imposed in 2024, with virtual private networks (VPN) letting users get around that ban.<\/p>\n PYMNTS has contacted Polymarket for comment but has not yet gotten a reply.<\/p>\n The CoinDesk report noted that France last year blocked 1,290 gambling-related URLs and joined more than other countries in restricting access to Polymarket. These countries include Belgium, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Switzerland.<\/p>\n The news comes as prediction markets continue to grow in popularity and branch out into new areas. For example, Polymarket rival Kalshi<\/a> announced last week that it had teamed with public intelligence company AppliedXL<\/a> on a program that allows trading on clinical trial outcomes<\/a> and Food and Drug Administration<\/a> (FDA) regulatory decisions.<\/p>\n \u201cDrug development is one of the most important and most information-constrained industries on earth,\u201d Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour<\/a> said in a news release.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe data that determines which drugs advance and which don\u2019t is largely locked away from the people who need it most. Surfacing information is what Kalshi is for, and we are committed to doing it right: compliance-first, carefully scoped and built for the long-term.\u201d<\/p>\n