American platforms Polymarket and Kalshi have listed IPL 2026 prediction market contracts that are drawing Indian users despite a sweeping national ban on real-money online gaming enacted last August. The IPL betting market is estimated at roughly $100 billion annually, providing both platforms with powerful commercial incentive to list cricket contracts.

Both platforms are actively hosting Indian Premier League contracts ahead of the 2026 season. As of early April, Polymarket had accumulated more than $617,000 in trading volume across over 100 active IPL contracts. Kalshi, which lists an outright IPL champion market, currently prices Mumbai Indians as frontrunners ahead of Royal Challengers Bengaluru. The activity sits at the intersection of a booming global prediction market sector and a regulatory crackdown in India that survey data, government URL-blocking figures, and independent analyses suggest has done more to redirect gaming offshore than to reduce it.

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The Law and Its Limits

India's Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act (PROGA 2025), which received Presidential assent on August 22, 2025, abolished the legal distinction between games of skill and games of chance. Under Section 5 of the Act, any platform where users stake money or virtual tokens expecting rewards qualifies as an online money game and is prohibited outright. Penalties for violations include imprisonment of up to three years and fines reaching one crore rupees. Repeat offenders face up to five years imprisonment and fines of two crore rupees.

MeitY, India's technology ministry, has formally classified Polymarket as an unauthorized offshore gambling platform and ordered ISPs including Jio to block the domain. As of March 28, 2026, India had blocked 8,376 gambling and betting URLs in total, with more than 4,800 of those blocks occurring after PROGA took effect, according to MeitY data cited by MediaNama.

Enforcement at the individual user level remains largely untested, but the financial risks extend beyond criminal statutes. Polymarket operates on the Polygon blockchain and settles trades in USDC, a dollar-pegged digital currency (a "stablecoin"). Indian users converting rupees to USDC through a registered domestic exchange such as CoinDCX, then routing funds to Polymarket's smart contracts, risk generating a Suspicious Transaction Report. That could trigger account freezes under India's foreign exchange laws (FEMA) and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), along with fines up to five lakh rupees under FEMA.

An important distinction separates the two platforms. Kalshi, as a CFTC-regulated US exchange, is subject to know-your-customer and geographic-blocking requirements that should theoretically exclude Indian users from participating. Polymarket, by contrast, operates on a permissionless blockchain architecture with no central authority capable of enforcing user restrictions, making the two platforms' situations meaningfully different from a regulatory and culpability standpoint.

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The Backfire Effect

Despite the blocks, evidence suggests Indian users are finding their way to offshore platforms in larger numbers than before the ban. A survey conducted by CUTS International in December 2025, covering 3,000 former real-money gaming users across Delhi NCR, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra, found offshore usage rose from 68.3 percent to 82 percent in Delhi after the ban took effect. In Tamil Nadu, the figure reached 83 percent. In Maharashtra, it reached 92 percent. Daily access frequency jumped from 3.4 percent to 42.3 percent of respondents. A separate BusinessToday analysis in March 2026 estimated that one in three former real-money gaming users in India had shifted to offshore sites.

According to an analysis by TradeTheOutcome.com, India remains one of Polymarket's largest user bases, with citizens bypassing ISP restrictions via VPNs and offshore crypto channels. Polymarket's permissionless architecture compounds the challenge for regulators: while MeitY can block the web interface, the underlying smart contracts on Polygon remain accessible through wallet software or alternative frontends without any central authority to compel a takedown. Indian users are not alone in this position; users in Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana face the same ISP-level blocking of decentralized finance protocols, which similarly remain reachable through wallet-native interfaces, illustrating how permissionless architecture routinely outpaces jurisdiction-based enforcement.

The financial stakes for individual users are substantial. Data from Storyboard18 and CUTS International indicates that monthly spending on offshore platforms exceeds 25,000 rupees among active participants, a figure that helps explain both the persistence of demand and the scale of funds moving outside India's regulated financial system.

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A Sector at Scale

The broader prediction market industry has expanded rapidly, providing both platforms with significant commercial incentive to attract international users. Monthly trading volume across prediction markets grew from roughly $1.2 billion in early 2025 to more than $21 billion by January 2026, according to analysis by blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs. Polymarket set a single-day volume record of $425 million on February 28, 2026, and recorded more than $7 billion in total volume for that month, a 7.5x year-over-year increase. Polymarket and Kalshi together account for roughly 82 percent of total sector volume, with Kalshi holding a 48 percent share and Polymarket at 44 percent.

Kalshi's current market position is the product of a recent regulatory journey. The platform received CFTC approval in late 2025 and relaunched in December 2025 after a 2022 regulatory ban, making its status as a legitimized US exchange relatively new. Sports contracts now account for roughly 90 percent of Kalshi's trading volume, which means IPL markets are strategically central to its business model rather than incidental additions.

Institutional money is tracking the growth. Kalshi is reportedly raising $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation, while Polymarket is targeting a valuation of approximately $20 billion. A new venture fund, 5c(c) Capital, backed by the CEOs of both companies, is separately raising up to $35 million to invest in the prediction market ecosystem.

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What Comes Next

The legal picture for Indian users could shift in the near term. PROGA 2025 faces an active constitutional challenge before India's Supreme Court, with opponents arguing that gaming regulation has historically been a state-level power. The court had set January 21, 2026 as its next review date but deferred again at that point; the case remains active. One legal expert cited in available reporting has said a complete ban on skill-based gaming is unlikely to survive judicial review, though the precise date of that analysis requires independent verification before it can be cited with full confidence. If the court narrows or overturns PROGA, it would immediately reopen a domestic market that offshore platforms are already demonstrating exists at significant scale, serving demand that existing regulation has so far been unable to suppress.

For builders, a practical gap also exists on the domestic side. No SEBI-compliant, rupee-denominated prediction market for sports events currently operates in India. Whether that space gets filled through regulatory reform or remains occupied by offshore platforms operating in what the law presently defines as a genuinely illegal space, not a grey zone, may depend heavily on what the Supreme Court decides.