Spain's gambling regulator, the DGOJ, has ordered a precautionary nationwide block on Polymarket and Kalshi and opened a sanctions procedure, treating the prediction platforms as unlicensed gambling rather than financial exchanges and aligning Spain with a widening European crackdown.
Spain's national gambling regulator, the Dirección General de Ordenación del Juego (DGOJ), has ordered a precautionary block on access to Polymarket and Kalshi while it investigates whether the two platforms have been operating without authorisation. According to the DGOJ, the measure was issued as part of a formal sanctions procedure opened by the Ministry of Social Rights, Consumer Affairs and Agenda 2030, under which the regulator operates. The regulator stated that both platforms offer betting products tied to uncertain future events without holding the administrative licence required under Spanish law.
The DGOJ said it published notice of the proceedings in the Boletín Oficial del Estado (BOE) on Tuesday 26 May 2026, a step taken after direct attempts to notify the US-based companies at their known foreign addresses proved unsuccessful. The regulator described the block as a precautionary measure rather than a final ruling, and the ministry indicated that the procedure is expected to run for three to four months before a resolution is reached. During that window, Spanish residents are effectively cut off from services that, in the regulator's view, operate from abroad without domestic oversight.
Central to the case is how Spain classifies the activity. The DGOJ treats wagering on uncertain future outcomes as gambling, which requires a specific licence regardless of how an operator describes its product. On that basis, the regulator has rejected the framing that these sites are simply trading exchanges or financial instruments. Polymarket and Kalshi run as marketplaces where users buy and sell positions tied to outcomes such as elections, conflicts, sport and weather, trading with one another while the platform takes a commission, but the DGOJ has held that the underlying activity remains gambling under Spanish rules.
Beyond the licensing question, the DGOJ grounded its intervention in consumer safety. The regulator said unauthorised operators lack the technical and regulatory guarantees that licensed firms in Spain are required to maintain, singling out the absence of robust identity verification systems. It also warned that the platforms do not have adequate controls to prevent participation by minors or by individuals on national self-exclusion registers. The DGOJ framed the ongoing investigation as a means to establish the full extent of the platforms' activity in the country, assign operator responsibility and enforce compliance with Spain's online gambling framework.
The move places Spain alongside other European jurisdictions that have reached similar conclusions. France's gambling authority, the Autorité nationale des jeux (ANJ), concluded in late 2024 that Polymarket's offer was likely to constitute unauthorised gambling and pushed the operator into geo-blocking French users from December 2024, citing risks amplified by round-the-clock availability and the absence of identity checks. Reporting on the wider crackdown notes that several other states, including Germany, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands, have also moved to block Polymarket on the grounds that it offers gambling without the required licence. The pattern is not confined to Europe: Brazil's authorities blocked a large group of prediction-market platforms in April after barring derivatives tied to sporting, political and entertainment events.
The commercial model at issue here is the event contract, a position priced like a derivative but settled on a real-world outcome. Operators lean on that resemblance to argue they sit within financial regulation rather than gambling law, and in the United States Kalshi has built its business under federal commodities oversight. Spain's DGOJ, like the ANJ before it, has looked past the trading mechanics to the substance of the transaction and concluded that staking money on an uncertain future result is a wager. Once a regulator settles on that reading, the financial-exchange defence offers little protection inside its borders.
The jurisdictional friction is the recurring theme. These platforms are designed to serve a global user base from a single offshore footprint, and several, including Polymarket, are crypto-adjacent, which is precisely what makes them hard to supervise locally. Yet the DGOJ has shown that a regulator does not need cooperation, or even successful contact, to act. By serving notice through the BOE and ordering access blocked at the network level, Spain has demonstrated that a determined authority can impose a domestic outcome on an operator that never engaged with it. The enforcement gap that prediction markets have relied on is narrowing as regulators reach for tools they already use against other unlicensed offshore sites.
The consistent thread across Spain, France and the others is consumer protection: identity verification, age gating and self-exclusion are treated as prerequisites for market access, not optional features. That points to channelisation rather than permanent exclusion. The door to lucrative European demographics is unlikely to stay shut to operators willing to license and adopt the safeguards that incumbent iGaming operators already run, but it remains closed to those who insist they are not gambling firms at all. The bottom line is that Europe is converging on a single classification, and the commercial question for Polymarket and Kalshi is no longer whether they are gambling but whether they will operate as licensed gambling businesses. Until they do, the run of national blocks looks set to continue.
