South Korean regulators blocked access to Polymarket and determined that it provided illegal contests

Comparatively, the Korea Broadcasting and Communications Review Committee (KCSC) held a Communications Review Subcommittee meeting today, determined that the overseas prediction market platform Polymarket provided illegal contests, and decided to block access to it. The committee determined that Polymarket's business model is based on the results of events beyond the user's control, such as politics, sports, elections, weather, etc., and uses a winner-take-all profit and loss structure to promote speculative mentality; the platform operator is responsible for market establishment, transaction rule setting and overall operation management, and provides a virtual asset acceptance and settlement system, which actually forms an environment for collecting and delivering user funds, and collecting processing fee profits through share transactions violates South Korea's Criminal Code and National Sports Promotion Law.

Polymarket has argued that the platform operates on non-custodial peer-to-peer transactions and smart contracts, and does not directly raise capital, manage funds, or issue voting rights for sports promotion. However, the Commission responded that the application of domestic laws in South Korea cannot be circumvented on the grounds of whether to provide Korean-language services, decentralized technology, or centralized transaction interfaces. Since the platform has actually provided illegal quizzes to Korean users, access blocking is unavoidable in order to protect domestic users.