The Czech Finance Ministry has included Polymarket to its blacklist of unauthorized online gambling websites, requiring internet providers to block access within 15 days.
The addition of Polymarket to Czechia’s gambling list mostly reads like a routine bureaucracy and most people consider it so because the platform is one of 1,076 domains the Ministry of Finance has blacklisted this year alone, pushing the country’s total blocklist past 3,300 sites.
ISPs now have just 15 days from July 13 listing to cut access, per the ministry’s Department of Procedural Agendas and Gambling Regulation.
Jan Řehola, director of the Czech Institute for Gambling Regulation, described the logic saying "If something looks like a bet, functions like a bet and allows people to win or lose money depending on the outcome of an uncertain event, we cannot stop treating it as gambling simply because it is called a contract." Czechia now joins Belgium, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands on the list of European jurisdictions that have restricted the platform.
But the main headline isn't another European country reaching the same conclusion to ban the platform but instead regulators not coming to the same conclusions anymore. On July 13th the same day as Czech acted, Gibraltar published the world's first standalone regulatory regime built just for prediction markets, taking the sector out of ordinary gambling law entirely under its Gambling Act 2025.
Two operators, ADI Predictstreet and WagerWire's Wire Markets, are being added into the new regime, which requires event contracts to be Gambling Authority-approved, resistant to manipulation, and barred from settling on outcomes like death, terrorism or armed conflict.
WagerWire co-founder Travis Geiger called it "a landmark moment for the prediction market industry," while Gibraltar's justice minister, Nigel Feetham, described the recognition saying "there remains no settled consensus as to how prediction markets should be characterised" globally.
That split is expanding on the financial regulatory side as well. In the US, the pressure is coming from Congress rather than courts as senators John Curtis and Adam Schiff asked the CFTC in June to investigate Polymarket following a Wall Street Journal report alleging paid creators pushed fabricated promotional claims about the platform.
Though none of this has slowed the volume of Polymarket as combined monthly trading across Kalshi, Polymarket and Polymarket US rose 75% in June to $44.8 billion, driven mostly by World Cup markets meaning the industry is moving faster than regulators are agreeing on what, legally, it even is.