Another European door closes as Gibraltar’s opens
The Czech Finance Ministry added Polymarket to its List of Unauthorized Internet Games on Monday, according to the country’s Institute for Gambling Regulation, which flagged the listing on Tuesday. Internet service providers now have 15 days to block access to the platform. The ministry, which maintains the list, already has several thousand websites on it.
The Czech rationale echoes the position regulators across Europe have taken: that whatever prediction markets call themselves, they function as gambling. The ministry considers Polymarket insufficiently supervised and therefore a risk. Jan Řehola, director of the Institute for Gambling Regulation – which welcomed the ministry’s decision – argued the distinction is fundamental.
“With legal gambling, the state knows who runs the game, who takes part, which bets are suspicious, and what mechanisms are meant to protect players and market integrity,” he said. “ Prediction markets, by contrast, open up betting on practically any event – from the weather to political decisions to security operations – but without comparable oversight. That is not innovation without risk. It is a gambling product outside the rules.”
Řehola also pointed to a risk specific to the format: because contracts settle on real-world outcomes, they create an incentive to influence those events or to trade on non-public information – the prediction-market equivalent of insider trading. That concern has shadowed Polymarket elsewhere, following episodes in which traders profited from contracts on geopolitical and security events.
The platform’s structure is central to why it keeps colliding with national gambling law. Polymarket operates as a decentralized exchange settling in the USDC stablecoin rather than through a licensed local operator, which places it outside the frameworks European regulators use to authorize and supervise betting.
The Institute noted that a wide range of EU countries restricted or blocked the platform in recent months – and the pressure has intensified this month, with Italy re-adding Polymarket to its blocked list and the Netherlands rejecting the platform’s appeal. The EU’s markets watchdog, ESMA, separately warned this month that event contracts meeting the definition of financial instruments are already barred from retail sale under existing binary-options rules.
Against that tide, a handful of jurisdictions are moving the other way. Gibraltar this week launched a bespoke regulatory framework for prediction markets – the first of its kind anywhere – carving the sector out of its general gambling law and licensing operators to serve the market rather than banning them.
Malta has said it is exploring a similar regime. The result is a widening European split: most national regulators are treating prediction markets as unlicensed gambling and blocking them, while a small number of jurisdictions are competing to become the sector’s regulated home – at a time when prediction-market trading volumes have surged into record highs driven partly by the World Cup, an event that has huge European audiences.
