France's gambling regulator, the Autorité Nationale des Jeux (ANJ), has ordered internet service providers to block access to Polymarket's website on French territory. The ANJ's president took the official blocking action on July 16, 2026, and the regulator publicly announced the order on July 17 (France24).

The ANJ considers Polymarket an illegal gambling operation, classifying its prediction-market platform as an unauthorized betting service under French law (ANJ). The regulator published its decision under the title "Promotion d'une offre de jeux d'argent illégale: blocage du site Polymarket." The ANJ is France's independent regulatory authority responsible for licensed gambling and betting games, and it possesses statutory administrative power to order ISP-level blocking of illegal gambling websites.

This is not the ANJ's first intervention against Polymarket. In November 2024, the regulator placed a geoblock on financial transactions from French residents on the Polymarket platform, effectively cutting off the ability to deposit funds or settle positions (ANJ, November 2024). At that time, the ANJ reported that Polymarket had ceased offering services in French territory following the intervention. The regulator identified non-payment of winnings and fraud as specific risks the platform posed to users.

The transaction-level geoblock, however, did not prevent French residents from visiting the site itself. According to the ANJ, Polymarket received 578,751 visits from French IP addresses in June 2026, including 205,057 unique visits (Engadget). Those traffic numbers evidently informed the regulator's decision to escalate from blocking payments to blocking the website outright at the ISP level.

The enforcement framework the ANJ operates under carries consequences beyond the platform itself. Under ANJ enforcement, anyone caught advertising an unauthorized betting or gambling site in France can be fined up to 100,000 euros (approximately $114,000). The ANJ has used its blocking powers broadly; as of its November 2024 notice, it had blocked more than 944 URLs of illegal gambling sites.

France is not alone in this approach. Polymarket has faced access restrictions in multiple jurisdictions, including Singapore, Poland, Portugal, Hungary, Ukraine, Brazil, and Indonesia (TradingView). The common thread across these actions is the classification of prediction markets as gambling rather than financial trading, a categorization that triggers distinct regulatory regimes in each country.

The ANJ's two-stage enforcement trajectory, from transaction blocking to full site blocking, is worth flagging for what it reveals about the limits of geofencing at the payment layer. Blocking financial flows does not eliminate platform access, and traffic volumes can persist or even grow despite formal regulatory action. The move to ISP-level DNS blocking is a more aggressive remedy, but one that is technically straightforward for motivated users to circumvent via VPN or DNS override. What it does effectively eliminate is casual, friction-free access for the general population.

For prediction-market operators, the French action underscores a regulatory perimeter that has been tightening across multiple jurisdictions simultaneously. The question of whether crypto-native prediction markets constitute gambling, commodity trading, or something unclassifiable under existing frameworks remains contested globally, and the answer varies by jurisdiction. France has clearly landed on its classification. The traffic data suggests that classification alone, without enforcement at the network layer, was insufficient to change user behavior at scale.