South Korean regulators have blocked access to Polymarket, ruling that the platform offers illegal gambling.

South Korea's Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC) held a meeting of its Communications Deliberation Subcommittee today, ruling that overseas prediction market platform Polymarket offered illegal gambling and decided to implement access blocking measures against it. The commission determined that Polymarket's business model is based on outcomes of events beyond users' control, such as politics, sports, elections, and weather, and uses a "winner-takes-all" profit-loss structure that fuels speculative sentiment. The platform operator is responsible for market establishment, trading rule setting, and overall operation and management, providing virtual asset acceptance and settlement systems, effectively creating an environment for collecting and delivering user funds, and earning profits by charging fees on share transactions—violating South Korea's Criminal Act and the National Sports Promotion Act. Polymarket had argued that the platform operates on non-custodial peer-to-peer transactions and smart contracts, and does not directly raise funds, manage funds, or issue sports promotion voting rights. However, the commission responded that technical characteristics such as whether it offers Korean language services, decentralized technology, or centralized trading interfaces cannot be used as grounds to evade the application of South Korea's domestic laws. Given that the platform has actually provided illegal gambling to South Korean users, access blocking is unavoidable to protect domestic users.