Vultax Research
Published October 19, 2026 | Version 2026-10-19
Working paper Open

Regulatory actions on Polymarket and Kalshi in 22 European jurisdictions

Authors/Creators

  • 1. Vultax Research, OmniOS OÜ, Tallinn, Estonia

Contributors

Hosting institution:

  • 1. OmniOS OÜ, Tallinn, Estonia

Description

A dated record of what European public authorities have done about Polymarket and Kalshi, read 19 October 2026 and updated to 23 October. It covers 22 jurisdictions and 53 actions: sixteen blocking orders or blacklistings, one penalty (420,000 euros in the Netherlands, now before a court), one licensing regime (Gibraltar's Prediction Market Regulations 2026, in force since 13 July 2026), and written replies from eight regulators to Vultax's questions. An action enters the record only when an authority, a court or a regulator's written reply documents it; where only press reports exist, the row says so and carries the report's date.

Two findings run through the record. Eleven of the sixteen blocks are not applied by Polymarket itself, whose published geographic restrictions name a shorter list. And only France, Spain and Switzerland have network tests behind their blocks; in France 82% of polymarket.com tests were anomalous or failed. Open at the reading: Spain's sanction case, due by about 26 November 2026; the merits of Polymarket's Italian appeal; the Danish appeal; and the Czech order that has required providers to block kalshi.com since 15 October.

Sources are the authorities' own documents, linked in each row, with ESMA's July 2026 statement on event contracts and its September risk monitor as the European frame.

Deposited: the page at https://vultax.com/research/prediction-markets-europe-regulation-tracker as a research note (PDF) and page (HTML, PDF) from 27 October 2026, the proof-scope record and a CITATION.cff. The page goes on being updated; this record is the reading of that date.

 

Authorship correction, 28 October 2026: Sophia Kurg is the lead author and Christopher Geneth Kurg is co-author. The archived files preserve the earlier attribution and have not yet been corrected.

Notes

Page first published 19 October 2026, last updated 25 October 2026. The snapshot prediction-markets-europe-regulation-tracker.html is the page as served on 2026-10-27 12:56 UTC, fetched with curl; scripts and styles it references are not included. prediction-markets-europe-regulation-tracker.pdf is the research note, Vultax Research Note 2026-031, in working-paper form (title page, abstract, keywords and JEL codes, numbered sections and tables, data availability, references, revisions), generated from the study on 27 October 2026; chart data appears as tables. citation.bib is its BibTeX entry. prediction-markets-europe-regulation-tracker-page.pdf is the page itself printed on 2026-10-27 14:45 UTC with headless Chrome in a white print layout; the site navigation, the analytics choice box, the share menu and the live figures strip are left out, and the footer names the page address. proof-scope.md and proof-scope.json are this study's record in the calculation-proof library at https://vultax.com/datasets/research-proof-library-2026-10-25/; their relative links point into that library. The photograph on the page is by Fred Romero via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0, and keeps that licence; the CC BY 4.0 licence of this record covers Vultax Research's own text, figures and data.

Competing interests: the author is a co-founder of OmniOS OÜ, which operates Vultax Research and publishes this series; Vultax Research publishes its research free of charge and may provide paid data and research services to businesses, none of which was involved in this work; the author holds no positions in the markets studied and has received no payment, data or other consideration from Polymarket, Kalshi or any other venue or data vendor beyond their public interfaces and published datasets. Funding: no external funding. Use of AI: generative AI tools (Anthropic's Claude) assisted with drafting, data processing and editing; the author directed the work, checked every figure and source, and takes full responsibility for the content.

Methods

An action enters the record when a public authority, a court, or a regulator's written reply to Vultax records it. The date is the document's own date; where Vultax has read only press reports, the row says reported and the date is the report's. Polymarket's own restrictions come from its geographic-restrictions page and describe its published policy, not tested access. Kalshi publishes no comparable page and most of its contracts are offered to United States residents only. Entries in the Polish, Swiss, Cypriot, Italian, Romanian, Latvian and Danish lists are read from the authorities' own published lists; where a list publishes no entry date, the row carries the date by which Vultax saw the entry and, where an archived copy exists, the date it was still absent. The network measurements are OONI's aggregate counts by probe country. Volunteers choose when and where to run tests, so the counts are not a sample of all connections, and an anomalous result is evidence of interference rather than proof that a block applies on every network. Where no tests exist, Vultax says so rather than inferring anything. The record covers the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Gibraltar and Ukraine. It is updated when a new document is read; the changelog records material changes. Challenge a row at research@vultax.com. This revision adds the Czech ministry's written response of 23 October 2026 and rechecks Polymarket's geographic-restrictions documentation on that date.

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Additional details

Identifiers

Other
Vultax Research Note 2026-031

Related works

Is identical to
Working paper: https://vultax.com/research/prediction-markets-europe-regulation-tracker (URL)
Is supplemented by
Dataset: https://vultax.com/datasets/research-proof-library-2026-10-25/articles/prediction-markets-europe-regulation-tracker.md (URL)

Dates

Collected
2026-07-21/2026-10-19
Observation window of the measurements shown in the study, from the coverage its charts state

References