Polymarket is a prediction market platform on which users trade binary contracts on the outcomes of political, economic, sporting, cultural and other events, with prices expressing the market's probability of each outcome. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in New York, it runs its markets on blockchain infrastructure settled in dollar-pegged stablecoins and became the most-traded prediction market during the 2024 US election. Polymarket was barred from serving US users under a 2022 settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and in 2025 acquired a CFTC-registered exchange and clearinghouse to re-enter the US market under federal regulation. It has raised venture capital at a multi-billion-dollar valuation.
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Catherine Hanaway says sports contracts "fit four square the definition of gambling in Missouri", that they siphon money from sportsbooks that pay the state's tax, and that what she wants is an agreement putting the exchanges under Missouri gaming law and taxing them. If there is no agreement she will sue; she expects them to sue her first.
A concrete recycler's tower beside I-94 has been painted Polymarket blue and lettered with the platform's name. The city says adverts on water towers need a permit, there is none on file, and its buildings department is sending an inspector out with a "possible correction order". The stunt lands in the one state where Polymarket has already lost in federal court and its rival Kalshi is under a state injunction.
Police data supplied to a National Assembly member show the Gangwon provincial cyber unit has booked 26 users of the blocked platform for gambling under Article 246 of the Criminal Act and referred 18 of them for prosecution. One trader alone put about KRW 5.7bn through the site. The defendants say a yes-or-no contract settled on a blockchain is a derivative, not a bet, and the courts have not yet been asked.
The 9 September order from the Department of Consumer Protection told Underdog to stop advertising and offering sports event contracts and to let residents withdraw. Underdog's answer, filed in federal court on Tuesday, is the same one it gave Ohio, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Washington: the CFTC has "exclusive jurisdiction" over a designated contract market, so the state's action is "meritless".
The site compares equivalent contracts across Kalshi, Polymarket, Novig, Underdog, FanDuel Predicts, Fanatics and five others, with a cross-venue engine for multi-leg positions and Genius's live game data underneath. It runs on Legend, the media business whose $1.2bn purchase in February sank the shares. Mark Locke says most prediction-market demand "appears new".
The Gaming Supervisory Authority opened an account, funded it and bet on sports results, then took the evidence to the Vilnius Regional Administrative Court. Internet providers must block the site and payment firms must stop dealing with Adventure One QSS. It is the first prediction market Lithuania has treated as an unlicensed bookmaker, and the 2,204th site it has blocked.
The Ohio Casino Control Commission's June resignation letter surfaced at a Massachusetts Gaming Commission meeting last week, where commissioners decided to stay "for now". The national problem-gambling body says taking Kalshi's money is not an endorsement. Three state bodies have decided it is.
The Protect College Sports Act cleared cloture 74-24 the same afternoon the CLARITY Act died. Buried in the committee-reported text is a line that lets conferences bench a student athlete for "sports wagering activities or sports-related event contracts", the first federal bill we have seen headed for a floor vote that puts the two in the same sentence.
For eight months the league's policy rested on one anonymously sourced report. Now its communications director has spelled it out: no prediction market advertising in games, stadiums, club deals or player endorsements, and sportsbook partners may only advertise an approved product, not the company.
Five months after the Finance Ministry ordered the site blocked, its markets on the October election are still reachable and a Portuguese-language account is promoting a candidate's lead among bettors. The AGU has asked for the file.
The "world's largest" online casino has shut its whole site to Irish users and says it will apply for a licence, while the regulator says two prediction markets and a major platform have geo-blocked and deposits are being refunded.
The EU securities regulator's risk report finds the biggest platforms hold no EU authorisation, that binary-option rules bar retail sale where contracts are derivatives, and that platform surveillance arrives only after the profits are banked.
Polymarket, Coinbase, Robinhood and six others have been told to cease and let residents withdraw their money, while PayPal, Sportradar, Genius Sports, ESPN, Apple and Google have been subpoenaed for what they know.
Federal prosecutors are said to be preparing a case alleging that an accountant used confidential audit data to win 41 of 42 earnings bets on Polymarket. It would be the first insider trading case built on a prediction market.
Senator Cynthia Lummis narrowed the bill's decentralised finance provisions specifically to answer tribal worries about prediction markets. The Indian Gaming Association says that misses the point: what it wants is text saying federal commodities law does not preempt tribal gaming law, and that exchanges cannot list contracts on sports or casino games.
The ANJ is looking at the front-of-shirt deal between the Ligue 1 club and a company that now runs its own event-contracts exchange, according to L'Equipe, the French sports daily. France blocked Polymarket in July, and the question this raises is whether a prediction-market operator can be a football sponsor in a country where it cannot take a bet.
Told by regulators in Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania that it could not offer both, Underdog has chosen its CFTC-registered event contracts over the draft games that built the company. Drafts close in those states on Wednesday evening, after the NFL season kicks off.
The American Gaming Association expects Americans to bet $29.5 billion legally on the 2026 NFL season, up barely at all on last year's $29.4 billion. Its chief executive says the reason is "backdoor sports betting" on prediction markets, and the numbers it cites for Novig, Rothera and Underdog explain why.
Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal report that Donald Trump Jr's 1789 Capital is leading a $1bn round valuing Polymarket at $21bn. It comes in the same week a federal appeals court and two Canadian regulators decided its core product is gambling, not finance.
Canada's securities regulators declined jurisdiction over sports event contracts on Thursday. By Friday British Columbia had picked it up, naming Kalshi and Polymarket and calling their sports and entertainment products illegal. That is the sequence operators should be watching.
The sportsbook has gone live with markets that settle in five minutes, through Crypto.com's CFTC self-certification. On Kalshi, short-dated crypto has gone from $643m in April to more than $4bn in July.
Hours after the NFL wrote prediction markets out of its data rights, Sportradar extended official data, streaming and integrity services to Polymarket across more than 20 competitions. One property is conspicuously absent from every one of these deals.
Two filings lodged with the CFTC on Tuesday turn individual NFL player availability into federally listed event contracts, trading from Thursday with no position limits. The legal argument for why they comply is sealed.
The Dodgers, Red Sox, Braves, Padres and Giants are Kalshi partners, and had been for weeks before anyone said so. Three of the five are in California, where no state lawsuit has been filed and the lobbying has already started.