The Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs, known as Komdigi, moved to block the US-based platform days after a market contract appeared on May 21 offering three exit-date scenarios for Prabowo: May 31, June 30, and December 31, 2026. The contract accumulated between $46,000 and $51,530 in trading volume. Traders assigned a 1% chance of Prabowo departing by May 31, 2% by June 30, and 18% by year's end. The December 31 scenario drew the most activity. Alexander Sabar, Director General of Digital Space Supervision at Komdigi, confirmed the block publicly. Neither he nor the ministry's formal statement named the Prabowo contract specifically.

Sabar framed the action in terms of gambling law, not political sensitivity. "The government will not provide space for any form of online gambling in Indonesia," he said, according to The Jakarta Post. The ministry's written statement added that Polymarket's activities "contain elements of monetary betting and speculation over uncertain events, making them violate prevailing laws and regulations in Indonesia." Officials described the platform as an "online gambling site disguised as a prediction market," arguing that settling bets on a blockchain does not alter the legal character of the underlying activity.

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What set the contract off

The Prabowo contract appeared one day after the president announced sweeping commodity export controls on May 20, requiring palm oil, coal, and ferroalloy exports to route through PT Danantara Sumber Daya, a vehicle tied to the state sovereign wealth fund Danantara. Bloomberg described Prabowo's economic approach as "unpredictable and unorthodox," and the policy immediately rattled international investors.

The move arrived against a backdrop of repeated mass protests since Prabowo took office in October 2024, over issues ranging from perks for military personnel to economic inequality. Prabowo publicly alleged, without presenting evidence, that the protest movements were controlled by foreign forces. Security forces detained more than 3,300 people during those demonstrations, and at least 10 deaths have been linked to the unrest. In January 2026, the government also introduced legislation targeting what it called "foreign disinformation and propaganda," which rights groups warned could be used to suppress domestic criticism.

Indonesia is a majority-Muslim nation of approximately 280 million people, and gambling prohibition is firmly embedded in both law and cultural consensus. That enforcement posture has intensified since Prabowo took office: the government has blocked approximately 3.4 million gambling-related websites and frozen more than 33,000 bank accounts linked to online betting. Indonesians lost an estimated $18.4 billion to online gambling in 2023 alone. The Polymarket action is not a one-off political reaction but part of a sustained, large-scale enforcement campaign.

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Enforcement goes beyond the website

The block is not limited to DNS-level filtering. Komdigi announced it would also trace and restrict social media accounts affiliated with or promoting Polymarket. That step is significant: it extends enforcement from infrastructure to individual users and community operators, including influencers and educators who discuss the platform without directly trading on it. Analysts have compared the tactic to China's internet governance model, noting it is unusual in the regional context. For Indonesian crypto community managers and content creators, this creates a compliance risk that does not require any financial participation in the platform.

Indonesian users who consider circumventing the block through VPNs face a layered risk. Polymarket operates across more than 33 blocked jurisdictions globally, and it has deployed detection tools that go beyond simple IP checks. Accounts identified as accessing the platform from banned jurisdictions through VPNs can be frozen or permanently terminated, including any funds held in them.

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The platform's scale and the region's stakes

Polymarket is not a fringe product. As of April 2026, it carries a valuation of $15 billion and processed more than $8 billion in trading volume that month alone, up from roughly $9 billion across all of 2024 and just $73 million in 2023. The platform has approximately 2.3 million active accounts. It runs on the Polygon blockchain and settles positions in pUSD, a Polymarket collateral token backed one-to-one by Circle-issued USDC. In February 2026, it launched a data product distributed through Intercontinental Exchange infrastructure, a signal of its push toward institutional markets.

Indonesia's block is not an isolated case. Singapore moved against Polymarket in January 2025. India formally blocked the platform in May 2026 under online gaming rules that classify prediction markets as "money games." Brazil blocked 27 prediction platforms in April 2026. The trend across South and Southeast Asia points toward a regional consensus: decentralised prediction markets are treated as gambling products regardless of how they settle.

That consensus has real consequences for Indonesian users. The country ranks 7th globally in crypto adoption according to Chainalysis data and 4th in the Asia-Pacific region by on-chain activity. More than 19 million active crypto users operate in the country, with 81% aged between 18 and 34. Indonesia removed the VAT on crypto transactions in August 2025, signalling a generally constructive posture toward digital assets. The Polymarket ban illustrates that this openness is product-specific. Crypto infrastructure is not gambling, in the government's framing, but a prediction market built on that infrastructure is.

Polymarket had not issued a public response to the Indonesian ban as of publication.