The Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ), France's national gambling authority, directed all domestic ISPs to implement DNS-level blocks on Polymarket.com. The order targets a platform that had attracted 205,057 unique French visitors in June 2026 alone, according to CoinDesk, despite a prior ANJ financial transaction ban issued in November 2024. ISPs that promote unlicensed gambling services face fines of up to 100,000 euros (approximately $114,380).

The ANJ cited three grounds for the escalation: Polymarket has never applied for a French gambling licence; the platform lacks self-exclusion tools and other responsible-gambling safeguards required under French law; and its wallet-based pseudonymous system does not meet French identity-verification (KYC) standards. In an official statement, the regulator said: "The site's homepage, which dynamically displays real-time odds for various events open to betting, thus serves as a major channel for disseminating and promoting Polymarket's offerings, even though the site's operations are not authorized in France."

The timing is significant. The block took effect as Polymarket was processing its largest-ever volume event. The platform's market on the World Cup champion had recorded $4.25 billion in total trading volume as of July 15, and combined World Cup activity across the platform exceeded $5 billion. Combined trading volume across Polymarket and rival platform Kalshi reached $44.8 billion in June 2026, according to figures reported by CNBC, with CoinDesk framing the tournament as a "$50 billion World Cup breakout" for prediction markets against traditional sportsbooks. Analysts at Bernstein projected that total wagering on the tournament through prediction markets could reach $10 billion by the time Spain and Argentina played the final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on July 19. France had been eliminated from the tournament before the final, meaning French users who held open positions were speculating on an Argentina versus Spain match as a third-party market, which makes the 205,057-visitor figure all the more striking. Those users lost access to the platform's interface as of July 16. Their on-chain positions, held in USDC (a dollar-pegged stablecoin) on the Polygon blockchain, remain technically intact because smart contracts execute automatically without requiring platform access. However, those users could not close, hedge, or monitor their positions through Polymarket's frontend.

The block is the most aggressive step yet in a regulatory timeline that has been building for over 18 months. In November 2024, ANJ tried blocking French payment processors from handling Polymarket deposits and withdrawals. That measure failed: users continued accessing the platform through VPNs and crypto on-ramp services. On May 4, 2026, a Paris prosecutor's cybercrime unit opened a formal criminal investigation into alleged manipulation of weather-based Polymarket markets, following a complaint from Météo-France, the state meteorological agency, over a tampered temperature sensor linked to active bets. Separately, a French trader identified only as "Fredi9999" moved multimillion-dollar positions during the 2024 U.S. election cycle, visibly shifting odds on one of the platform's highest-profile markets. That incident drew significant press coverage in France and reinforced the ANJ's concerns about systemic manipulation risks. Polymarket had issued no public statement in response to the block order as of the time of reporting.

France is not acting alone. Spain imposed a temporary ban on Polymarket and Kalshi in May 2026. The Netherlands has moved to active enforcement under existing national gambling law, joining France as a jurisdiction that has escalated beyond warnings to concrete blocking measures. Polymarket now faces restrictions across 36 jurisdictions globally and has itself blocked VPN-linked IP addresses in 33 countries to enforce its own geofencing. In the United States, a coalition of 18 states led by Kentucky has mounted legal challenges against the platform. South Korean police have opened a criminal gambling investigation into domestic users who used VPNs to access Polymarket from a blocked jurisdiction, underscoring the exposure faced by users in grey-area markets who treat regulatory inaction as equivalent to legality.

For users in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, the French order matters beyond its immediate geography. India and Nigeria currently have no restrictions on Polymarket access, and both countries represent substantial user bases for on-chain prediction markets. No equivalent to the ANJ's licensing framework exists in either jurisdiction for USDC-settled smart contract markets. The ANJ's legal reasoning, which classifies any platform offering odds on uncertain outcomes without a local licence as an unlicensed gambling operator, is directly replicable by regulators elsewhere. Within the European Union, the bloc's flagship crypto regulation, the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework, contains no provisions covering prediction markets, leaving national gambling regulators in EU member states to act independently of any coordinated EU framework. That regulatory gap is specific to the EU context; MiCA does not apply to India or Nigeria. Even so, the underlying logic of the ANJ's approach is not geographically limited: if regulators in those markets adopt similar reasoning, users could face enforcement without warning.

The World Cup final settlement on July 19 will serve as a live stress test for the Polygon network, which will process billions of dollars in simultaneous USDC payouts. Developers and data providers in South Asia and Africa who build on Polymarket's on-chain data or API feeds should treat this as a meaningful infrastructure benchmark. For the more than 200,000 French users who visited the platform in June, the stakes are more immediate: they were locked out of active positions in the middle of the tournament's biggest market, with no way to act on their holdings until the block is lifted.

Polymarket had not issued a public statement at the time of publication. The ANJ order remains in effect indefinitely pending full regulatory compliance by the platform.