Finance Minister Dario Durigan announced the platform blockings at a press conference Friday, stating plainly that prediction markets have no legal standing in the country.

"We concluded that prediction markets are neither legal nor regulated in Brazil," Durigan said. The action came one day after the CMN passed a resolution defining which underlying assets can support derivatives contracts in Brazil. The new rule explicitly excludes assets tied to sports events, online gaming, and political, electoral, cultural, or social outcomes.

Polymarket, one of the largest decentralized prediction markets by trading volume, is among the named platforms affected. The protocol runs on Polygon, an Ethereum layer-2 network, which means its smart contracts remain live and technically accessible to any user with a crypto wallet. Brazil's block operates at the domain and access layer, not the protocol layer. That distinction matters: Argentina issued a similar nationwide ban on Polymarket in March 2026, and that domain-level action failed to prevent determined users from circumventing it via VPN, establishing a precedent for how Brazil's analogous approach will face the same limitations.

The CMN's derivatives resolution targets regulated financial instruments structured through Brazilian intermediaries. It does not address on-chain prediction protocols directly.

Presidential Chief of Staff Belchior framed the government's position in consumer protection terms. "Our goal is to prevent the consolidation of a new, uncontrolled betting market through predictions," he said. "If a company wants to operate in Brazil, it must do so under clear rules that protect the population."

That framing reflects a broader public health emergency in the country. According to reporting by CryptoSlate, roughly 10.9 million Brazilians engage in gambling that damages their finances, families, or mental health, and more than half of adolescents aged 14 to 17 show risk patterns associated with gambling addiction. An additional 1.4 million Brazilians meet the clinical profile for severe gambling disorder.

The government blocked more than 25,000 illegal betting sites in 2025 and launched a dedicated mental health support program for problem gamblers earlier this year, a program staffed by 20,000 professionals in training.

The regulatory picture is not a blanket prohibition on prediction instruments. Brazil's securities regulator, the CVM, approved B3 (the country's main stock exchange) in February 2026 to launch regulated event-based binary contracts starting April 27, 2026. Those instruments let professional investors take yes-or-no positions on outcomes like bitcoin's price, the USD/BRL exchange rate, the Selic interest rate, and the Ibovespa equity index.

The B3 carve-out suggests Brazil is drawing a distinction between licensed, exchange-traded products for professional investors and offshore, unregistered platforms serving retail users.

The crackdown follows months of pressure from licensed Brazilian betting operators. On February 27, 2026, operators formally asked Brazil's gambling watchdog, the Secretaria de Prêmios e Apostas (SPA), to block Polymarket and Kalshi. On March 9, 2026, the SPA issued an official notice confirming that no company was authorized to operate prediction markets under Brazil's betting framework and stated it was conducting technical studies on how to classify these products and which regulator, the CVM or the SPA, held jurisdiction. That formal regulatory signal preceded the April 24 action and forms a key part of the timeline leading to it.

Each licensed operator had paid more than R$30 million (roughly $5.5 million) to obtain operating rights under Brazil's fixed-odds betting law, which took effect in January 2025. They argued the offshore platforms were capturing market share without bearing any of those costs.

Kalshi had already launched in Brazil in March 2026 through a partnership with XP International and its brokerage arm Clear Corretora, offering contracts on inflation and interest rate outcomes to clients with international investment accounts.

Kalshi co-founder Luana Lopes Lara had described the product to Brazilian financial publication Valor as a regulated financial instrument operating under U.S. CFTC oversight, distinct from sports betting. That framing did not ultimately satisfy Brazilian authorities.

Brazil had quietly grown into one of Polymarket's fastest-expanding user bases before the ban. The platform recorded 1.46 million visits from Brazil in the first quarter of 2026, an 85 percent increase over the prior quarter, a growth rate comparable to markets like Italy and Vietnam. Polymarket also ranked among the top 4,000 most visited websites in Brazil during that period.

Zooming out from Brazil, Polymarket posted its first-ever $10 billion monthly trading volume in March 2026, and the broader prediction market industry topped $20 billion in monthly volume in January 2026, up from roughly $1.2 billion in early 2025.

Despite that growth, the economics skew sharply toward a small group of participants: approximately 70 percent of Polymarket wallet addresses have realized net losses, and fewer than 0.04 percent of accounts captured more than 70 percent of total profits.

Brazil is now the second major Latin American economy to formally restrict Polymarket in under two months.

For builders and platform operators targeting emerging markets, the pattern carries a clear signal. In India, prediction markets are already classified as illegal online money games under the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act (PROGA) of 2025. Enforcement has been inconsistent and Polymarket remains accessible without a VPN there, but the legal classification is stricter than the situation in Brazil was before April 24.

African markets with high crypto and mobile betting penetration, including Nigeria and Kenya, have no formal prediction market rules in place but are watching the regional trend. When regulatory action does arrive in Sub-Saharan Africa, it is more likely to be reactive (blocking) than proactive (licensing), following the pattern seen across Latin America.

The Kalshi model, entering a market through a locally licensed financial intermediary, now appears to be the most viable approach that Brazil's framework would have accommodated.

Whether that pathway remains open after Friday's announcements is not yet settled.