Dutch Regulator Says Polymarket’s Prediction Market Is Gambling

The Kansspelautoriteit (KSA) has rejected an appeal from Adventure One QSS Inc, the company that operates Polymarket in the Netherlands, and stood by its earlier view that the platform is offering gambling products. For high-risk payment providers, the useful part is simple: the regulator is treating blockchain and crypto rails as irrelevant if the underlying product looks like betting on future outcomes.

1. The KSA said Polymarket’s products fall under the Dutch gambling framework because users place trades on the outcome of future events in exchange for prizes or rewards. In the regulator’s view, that is still gambling, even if the platform describes the activity as trading rather than betting.
2. The ruling was published on June 23 and reaffirmed that the KSA would pursue enforcement action against Polymarket’s parent company if the platform fails to comply with local regulation. That matters for PSPs and acquirers because the regulator is not treating this as a semantic dispute; it is treating it as a licensing and enforcement issue.
3. Adventure One argued that Polymarket is an open-source blockchain protocol that enables peer-to-peer trades, and pointed to precedent for treating such activity as a financial product. The KSA dismissed that framing, saying the product still contains a clear element of randomness or chance that makes it closer to gambling than to an informed financial decision.
4. The regulator also said the use of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology does not change the regulatory analysis and does not exempt the platform from Dutch law. In other words, the rails do not decide the category; the product does.
5. Another point the KSA raised was Polymarket’s own marketing language, including the Dutch phrasing: “Stay informed and profit from your knowledge by betting on future events.” The regulator also said the platform appeared to be deliberately targeting consumers in the Netherlands by offering materials in Dutch.

For payment teams, the practical takeaway is that “prediction market” branding does not automatically move a product out of gambling supervision. If a regulator can point to betting language, local-language targeting, and payout-linked event outcomes, it has a fairly neat path to classify the flow as gambling, regardless of whether settlement happens in crypto or on-chain.