France Orders Polymarket Block After 578,751 June Visits

France Orders Polymarket ISP Block

The ANJ said the order was necessary because Polymarket had continued to attract a large French audience despite the earlier compliance measure. It reported 205,057 unique French visitors in June, alongside the 578,751 total visits, citing Similarweb.

Those figures give the enforcement order a more concrete scale than a routine licensing warning. A platform can limit transaction flows based on location, but the ANJ’s notice argues that a heavily visited homepage still promotes an illegal offering when it presents live odds and market prompts to a French audience.

The agency said its concerns date to November 2024, when it examined services offered by Panama-incorporated Adventure One QSS Inc. through Polymarket’s websites. At the time, the operator put a geo-block in place following an ANJ demand. The regulator now says that measure did not prevent practical workarounds.

France has not announced a financial penalty against Polymarket in the July notice. Instead, the regulator invoked its administrative blocking authority, which it said it used against 1,290 URLs in 2025. The ANJ said advertising an unauthorized online gambling service can expose a promoter or publisher of its odds to a $100,000 fine under the relevant French rule.

The order is a different kind of risk from a market suspension or a settlement dispute. It does not resolve how Polymarket contracts settle, but it can restrict the path a local user takes to view, trade or discover those contracts. That distinction is increasingly important as platforms present event contracts with trading-style interfaces.

French Regulator Cites Traffic and Manipulation Risk

The ANJ’s notice tied the access order to more than traffic. It said certain weather bets on Polymarket appeared to have been distorted because weather sensors may have been hacked, and that Paris prosecutors opened a cybercrime investigation on May 4 that was assigned to France’s anti-cybercrime office.

The regulator did not say in its notice that Polymarket itself manipulated a market, nor did it disclose the outcome of the investigation. Its narrower claim is that the episode exposed an integrity risk for prediction markets that rely on external data and resolution sources.

The agency also said the episode showed what it described as a lack of user-identification controls, known as know-your-customer or KYC checks, on Polymarket services accessible to French and European audiences. KYC ordinarily refers to processes used to verify customers’ identity and assess restrictions before offering regulated financial or gambling products.

That rationale reaches beyond whether a contract is paid for with crypto. The ANJ said in its 2024 Polymarket action that its concern was the alleged unauthorized gambling offer, not the fact that financial operations used cryptocurrencies. The February warning likewise described prediction markets as sites where binary yes-or-no contracts can appear investment-like while carrying gambling and addiction risks.

France’s approach contrasts with U.S. arguments that some event contracts belong under derivatives oversight. The legal tension has become sharper as platforms seek brokerage distribution, including Polymarket’s U.S. margin-trading pathway, while state and national authorities continue to apply gambling rules.

Europe Splits Over Prediction Market Regulation

The French regulator said Germany, Belgium, Romania, Switzerland, Poland, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Ukraine and the Czech Republic have already restricted or blocked prediction markets. The statement does not mean those countries share an identical law, enforcement mechanism or treatment of every platform.

Still, the list shows how quickly an access issue can become a European distribution issue. The ANJ describes prediction markets as hybrid products, a characterization that helps explain why one authority may focus on gambling safeguards while another considers market structure, consumer law or financial-product rules.

This is also not a Polymarket-only policy question. Daily Crypto Briefs has covered the wider debate over EU limits on retail access to prediction markets, where the central conflict is whether a product’s trading format changes the protections that regulators expect.

For readers, the confirmed development is specific: French internet providers were ordered to block Polymarket after the ANJ concluded its previous location controls were not sufficient. The broader inference is more limited: platform growth is inviting regulators to test where online trading, gambling, identity controls and data integrity overlap.

The Crypto Fear and Greed Index stood at 28, or Fear, when checked on July 19. The Bitcoin-focused measure does not assess France’s enforcement action, but it puts a regulatory access shock against a guarded market backdrop.

What comes next is whether French providers implement the order uniformly, whether Polymarket changes its access controls or challenges the measure, and whether another regulator uses the French traffic and integrity case as a model. The ANJ did not publish a timetable for those steps.