Key Highlights
Argentina’s court ordered a nationwide block of Polymarket, including app removals, over unlicensed online betting concerns.
The decision was influenced by suspicious pre-release bets on February inflation, raising potential market manipulation issues.
The move makes Argentina the second Latin American country to ban the platform, following Colombia, amid growing global scrutiny of crypto prediction markets.
Argentina has ordered a national ban on Polymarket, a major prediction market platform, after a Buenos Aires court found that it was operating outside legal gambling frameworks and posed a consumer risk. Judges instructed the country’s telecom regulator, ENACOM, to block access to the site at the internet service level and directed Google and Apple to remove the app from their app stores for Argentine users.
The move follows complaints from local gaming authorities and concerns that Polymarket lacked basic protections, such as identity verification, thereby allowing rapid crypto and credit-card bets that authorities contend resemble unregulated gambling rather than neutral markets. Reports also highlighted suspicions about trading tied to Argentina’s recent inflation data, in which internal market activity shifted shortly before the official statistics were published, a factor cited by the court in its ruling.
Argentina becomes one of several jurisdictions to restrict Polymarket’s access amid rising scrutiny of decentralized prediction platforms. In Latin America, Colombia previously banned the platform for similar reasons, and regulators worldwide have questioned whether crypto-based event betting requires stricter oversight or licensing.
