The Gambling Authority of Belgium (Kansspelcommissie) added Polymarket to the blacklist of illegal gambling websites on January 30, 2025.
It is reported that Polymarket could not respond to three separate warnings issued by Kanspelcommissie, which subsequently submitted a request to the State Prosecutor in Belgium on blocking access to the site. The body did not provide specific information about the interaction of Polymarket with Belgian consumers.
Polymarket, founded in 2020 by Shayne Coplan, positions itself as a cryptocurrency platform, which offers forecasting markets for real events for investors, including political results, economic indicators, weather models and awards.
The platform gained fame during the US elections in 2024, reporting over $3.3 billion in traded predictions on the outcome of the US presidential race, which was won by Donald Trump.
It is noteworthy that after the US election in the USA, Polymarket was investigating by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), according to its status for predicting events trading as a derivatives platform.
Coplan considers Polymarket as a destroyer of a traditional survey and forecasting, claiming that the crypto platform democraticized the involvement of an audience with biased news cycles.
It is noteworthy that Polymarket predicted that Trump will win the elections over the former vice president Kamala Harris, despite the main surveys and forecasts that predict a small advantage of the Democrats candidate.
After the US elections, Polymarket left France after the French gambling authority (ANJ) began an investigation into a French player who put $30 million on a Trump victory.
Polymarket received support from Peter Til and Vitaly Buterin, founder of the Ethereum blockchain, which support the mission of the site to free forecasting from biased sources.
Critics claim that Polymarket is an unlicensed platform that has no transparency as to who can influence its forecasts. They argue that the markets remain susceptible to large -scale transactions, rejecting Polymarket as a genuine destroyer of traditional methods of forecasting and analysis.
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