Key Takeaways:
- Hungary and Portugal have gone ahead to prohibit entry of Polymarket with reference to a contravention of national laws on gambling.
- The authorities still regard prediction markets as unlicensed gambling, not as financial products, which further confuses the law in Europe.
- The recent measures are just the addition to the list of the countries that have already blocked or restricted the activity of Polymarket.
Hungary Pulls the Plug, and with Pending Review
The latest European country to block Polymarket is Hungary, which has requested the internet service providers to block the site and the subdomains. The regulatory body in the country that regulates the gambling and regulated activities made this ruling based on the illegal organization of the gambling services.
It is an immediate but temporary block as it is stated on the official notice that will be released only when the authority has completed its examination. The order incorporates the details of the area of Polymarket and is operational in the entire country and the site users are now given a regulatory warning upon entry.
Portugal Foreshadows the Same Manner
Polymarket has also been ordered by the Gaming Regulation and Inspection Service of Portugal to stop operating because the service does not have the license that it is expected to bear and it is conducting operations in a jurisdiction where political betting is criminal.
The local media supplemented that the regulators were going the way of prohibiting access despite the seeming lack of balance in the application of the regulation in the point of reporting. It was found that millions of euros were bets on the political developments in the nation and this led to the larger issue of the integrity of the market and the breach of the non-public information by the government.
A Pattern Across Europe
The Hungary and Portugal moves are not alone. In several jurisdictions in Europe, such as France, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, and others, polymarket have been restricted or blocked already as regulators continue to apply gambling laws to onchain prediction markets.
Swiss government, e.g., officially placed Polymarket on the country’s official list of gambling blocks, and thus considered it an unlicensed betting service and ordered access to be blocked by federal law. Other states have followed suit and in many cases, there is no protracted legal tussle.
Consequently, dozens of countries have geoblocked Polymarket now, which it is disclosing on its own site.
Finance or Gambling? The Core Dispute
The treaty is the pretext to the crackdown in which the prediction markets should be taken into consideration. The advocates believe that the Polymarkets act as financial markets and the market price is determined by the market expectation and flows of information.
But exactly the opposite has been largely true with the regulators in Europe who have viewed the outcome-based contracts as bets, settled onchain or priced by market participants but no longer settled by a bookmaker.
This regulatory framing would put prediction markets directly within the gambling laws, which would initiate licensing procedures that most crypto-native platforms fail to fulfill.
More News: Polymarket Unveils Rapid-Fire 15-Minute “Up/Down” Crypto Price Bets
Prediction Markets in a Regulatory Crossroad
Polymarket as a case is an illustration of a bigger problem to crypto-native applications in the gray zone between finance and gambling as additional European regulators intervene.
Timely access restrictions are therefore likely to persist as long as prediction markets have not been assigned a distinct legal status not due to the manner in which they are constructed, but by the discretion of the regulators.
Europe seems to be putting an ax to the root, at present.
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