French gambling regulator wants to prevent French users from betting on Polymarket.
As Polymarket became one of the most talked about platforms in the crypto space during the 2024 US presidential election cycle, France has taken note and is looking to ban it. The country’s gambling regulator wants to prevent French citizens from using the platform and could bring enforcement despite transactions on it facilitated by cryptocurrency.
The Autorité nationale des jeux (ANJ)—the National Gaming Authority of France—is currently investigating Polymarket’s operations, as reported by Bloomberg on November 7. Another publication, reporting everything crypto, broke the news first on November 6.
The Bloomberg article mentioned, “The scrutiny comes after a pseudonymous trader, identified by Polymarket as a French national, made large bets using four separate accounts on the platform in favor of Donald Trump winning the race.”
That trader, going by the pseudonymous identity Fredi9999, placed about $20 million in bets across numerous accounts on Polymarket. With Trump’s landslide victory against Kamala Harris in the November 6 showdown, they will make about $50 million to more than double their profits.
Polymarket is a decentralized betting platform launched in 2020, allowing users to put their money on event predictions. That includes a wide array of events, like elections, war outcomes, and countries striking missiles at each other, among numerous others. It gained tremendous prominence in 2024 due to the elections and saw $2.5 billion flow into its contracts in October alone.
The firm behind this platform is based out of New York. Still, US citizens do not have access to bet on it. Polymarket witnesses all of its action from overseas, with users in countries like France betting big. That has ticked the ANJ off. A source close to the regulator told Bloomberg, “Even if Polymarket uses cryptocurrencies in its operations, it remains a betting activity, and this is not legal in France.”
Since the platform allows users to bet on random occurrences, which qualifies as betting, the French betting regulator holds enough grounds to ban it from operating in the country. However, when the US Commodities Futures Exchange Commission (CFTC) wanted to ban Kalshi’s election prediction contracts across the pond, many researchers came out to defend such platforms. They mentioned how prediction contracts offer greater accuracy in knowing the outcome of events, even more than polls, as bettors have their skin in the game.
Trump May Have Found Out He Was Victorious From Polymarket
To that end, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan mentioned that Trump’s team found out he had won after looking at the odds on the platform. “I just got word that the Trump campaign HQ literally found out they were winning from Polymarket,” his X post mentioned.
