France's national gambling regulator has ordered internet service providers to block Polymarket, the prediction market that allows users to trade on real-world events using cryptocurrency.
The order , issued by the Autorité Nationale des Jeux on July 16, escalates a four-year regulatory standoff into something materially more hardline — and more explicitly framed around harm to users than around financial-market integrity.
The distinction matters as the ANJ is not treating Polymarket as an unlicensed trading venue equivalent to an unregulated exchange. It is treating it as an illegal gambling operation — the same category it uses for unlicensed casino and sportsbook operators. That framing carries different legal weight, different enforcement levers, and different implications for how other European regulators might respond.
The numbers behind the escalation
Previous French action — a November 2024 ban on financial transactions with Polymarket — failed to meaningfully reduce access. The platform drew 578,751 visits from 205,057 unique French visitors in June 2026 alone, according to Similarweb data cited by the ANJ. A VPN was sufficient to circumvent the financial transaction block. The ANJ's conclusion: a block on the homepage itself was the only effective lever.
The ANJ also cited a complaint from Météo-France over a tampered temperature sensor used to manipulate weather-based markets on Polymarket. The Paris prosecutor's cybercrime unit opened an investigation on May 4. Separately, regulators pointed to a French trader operating under the handle "Fredi9999," whose large positions moved U.S. election odds in 2024 and drew scrutiny from French authorities.
The ANJ reclassified prediction markets as illegal gambling in February 2026, citing the absence of stake limits and self-exclusion tools — consumer protection mechanisms that licensed gambling operators in France are required to provide.
What this means for the sector
France is not alone. Polymarket is now restricted in more than 30 jurisdictions. Switzerland blocked the site in November 2024; Poland, Singapore and Belgium followed in early 2025; Portugal acted in January 2026; and Spain issued a temporary block in May pending a probe. Brazil, Argentina, India and Indonesia have also moved, alongside Italy, Germany, Romania, Hungary and Ukraine.
But France is the largest EU economy to take direct ISP-level action, and it is doing so with explicit language around addictive mechanics and consumer harm — the same language used to target loot boxes and other interactive gambling-adjacent products.
The more consequential question is whether this becomes an EU-wide matter. The ANJ's classification of prediction markets as gambling — rather than as a financial instrument or information service — sits uneasily alongside the EU's existing framework for digital assets under MiCA. If other member states follow France's logic, prediction markets could face a unified EU prohibition under gambling law rather than regulation under financial markets law. That would be a meaningfully different path than the compliance route that platforms like Kalshi have been building toward.
Kalshi, the CFTC-regulated prediction market that has been expanding its institutional presence in the U.S., has previously indicated interest in European market development. An EU-wide gambling classification would complicate that calculus significantly — not because European users couldn't access the product, but because the regulatory and reputational framing would be fundamentally different from what Kalshi has built in the U.S.
For now, France is the test case. If the ISP block reduces French traffic meaningfully — and if the investigation into the Météo-France manipulation produces prosecutorial results — other EU regulators will be watching closely before deciding how to act.
