Indonesia's Ministry of Communications and Digital Affairs banned access to Polymarket on May 24 and 25, 2026, classifying the US-based prediction market as an illegal online gambling platform.

The move makes Indonesia the 34th country to restrict or ban the platform and follows a similar ISP-level block by India just four days earlier. Together, the two actions compress two of Asia's largest internet markets out of Polymarket's addressable reach within a single week. India ranks among the world's largest internet markets by users, and Indonesia holds the fourth-largest population globally and is a top-five mobile internet market.

The ministry's stated justification was straightforward: Polymarket facilitates "monetary betting and speculation over uncertain events," which violates Indonesian law. Director General of Digital Space Supervision Alexander Sabar was unambiguous in a public statement. "The government will not provide space for any form of online gambling in Indonesia," he said.

The legal basis includes Articles 303 and 303 bis of Indonesia's Criminal Code, Law No. 7 of 1974 on Gambling Control, and the updated Information and Electronic Transactions (ITE) Law from 2024. That last statute carries penalties of up to 10 years imprisonment for distributing or facilitating online gambling content.

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The timing is harder to separate from politics than the official framing suggests.

On May 20, President Prabowo Subianto announced that Indonesia would centralize state control over exports of palm oil, thermal coal, and nickel through sovereign wealth fund Danantara. Bloomberg reported the announcement rattled investors and triggered capital outflows. The next day, May 21, a Polymarket bet on Prabowo's potential early exit from office appeared and spread rapidly across Indonesian social media. The ministry issued its blocking order three days later. Authorities did not formally cite the bet as a reason for the ban, but the sequence is difficult to ignore. The ministry did, however, frame its action as internationally precedented, publicly citing Singapore, Brazil, and India as countries that had already imposed comparable bans.

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Indonesia's broader crackdown on online gambling predates this specific incident by years. Since 2024, a joint task force coordinating the ministry, the Financial Services Authority (OJK), and financial intelligence unit PPATK has frozen more than 33,252 bank accounts linked to gambling networks. Readers tracking OJK as a crypto regulator should note that its role in the gambling task force is distinct from its function as Indonesia's crypto asset regulator, a mandate it assumed on January 10, 2025, when regulatory authority over crypto assets was transferred from BAPPEBTI to OJK.

The ministry has also summoned Cloudflare for allegedly shielding prohibited gambling sites from detection. Officials confirmed they will now actively trace and block social media accounts promoting Polymarket and intend to pursue similar prediction market platforms. Citizens were explicitly warned against using VPNs (virtual private networks, tools that mask a user's location online) to circumvent the block.

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Despite the front-end ban, Polymarket's underlying infrastructure remains technically reachable. The platform runs on Polygon, a blockchain network, and settles trades via pUSD, a USDC-backed collateral token. DNS and ISP-level blocks prevent most users from loading the website, but the smart contracts (self-executing code on the blockchain) are not blocked. Technically proficient users can still interact with them directly. Given Polymarket's roughly $430 million in total value locked and its record monthly trading volume of over $7 billion in February 2026, such users represent a small fraction of the platform's overall audience.

Any developer building on Polymarket's API should treat Indonesia, India, and Brazil as jurisdictions with no regulatory safe harbor and implement their own geo-restrictions accordingly.

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India's ban, issued May 21 by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, adds particular weight to the regional picture. India accounted for roughly 6.49 percent of Polymarket's global traffic as of April 2026, making it one of the platform's more significant markets. Indian regulators are now in the process of blocking Kalshi, Polymarket's US-regulated competitor, under the country's Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, which formally took effect May 1, 2026.

The dual bans suggest that prediction markets as a category, not just Polymarket specifically, are the regulatory target across the Asia-Pacific region.

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For readers in Africa, the pattern carries a direct warning. Nigeria's on-chain crypto economy and Kenya's recently enacted Virtual Asset Service Providers framework represent growing markets where prediction markets could gain traction. Africa's crypto on-chain value grew 52 percent year-on-year to approximately $205 billion, a figure that underscores the stakes for both platforms and regulators. Nigeria's regulatory posture is also sharpening: the country now recognizes digital assets as securities under the Investments and Securities Act 2025, a classification that could directly shape how Nigerian authorities approach prediction markets going forward.

Indonesia's approach illustrates how broadly written gambling statutes can be applied to block platforms with minimal procedural friction. The timeline of events in this case makes it difficult to dismiss the possibility that political timing played a role, even though authorities have not acknowledged it.

Luno's March 2026 launch of prediction markets in Nigeria and South Africa, built in partnership with Limitless and limited strictly to crypto price events rather than political outcomes, looks less like a conservative product decision and more like what may be a deliberate attempt to avoid exactly the classification problem that has now cost Polymarket access to a significant share of its addressable volume across Asia.

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Polymarket has not publicly responded to either the Indonesian or Indian bans. In the US, the platform relaunched in December 2025 under CFTC oversight following its acquisition of regulated exchange QCEX, complete with mandatory identity verification and regulated intermediaries.

That regulated return at home stands in sharp contrast to its accelerating exclusion across much of the Global South, where the gap between what prediction markets promise and what governments will permit is narrowing fast.