Argentina Becomes the 34th Country to Block Polymarket After a Court Rules the Platform an Unlicensed Gambling Service

A Buenos Aires court ordered a nationwide block on Polymarket on March 16, 2026, making Argentina the 34th country to restrict access to the prediction market platform and the second in Latin America after Colombia.

According to report by Clarin, the ruling directed ENACOM, Argentina’s national communications regulator, to instruct all internet service providers to cut off access to the site and its variants immediately.

What Triggered the Ruling

The legal action was initiated by LOTBA, the Lottery of the City of Buenos Aires, which filed a complaint arguing that Polymarket operated without a local license and lacked the consumer safeguards required under Argentine law, specifically age verification and identity checks. The court agreed, classifying the platform as an unlicensed online gambling service.

Beyond the licensing argument, one specific incident accelerated the process. Polymarket reportedly displayed an accurate 2.9% inflation estimate approximately 15 minutes before Argentina’s national statistics agency INDEC officially released the figure. That timing gap raised concerns about potential insider access to non-public government data, a politically sensitive issue in a country where inflation figures carry significant economic and social weight. The incident gave regulators additional impetus to move quickly.

The enforcement order covers more than website access. The court also instructed Apple and Google to remove Polymarket’s mobile applications from their respective app stores for Argentine users, a measure that closes the most obvious workaround for a browser-level ISP block.

A Platform Under Pressure Globally

Argentina’s block fits into a pattern that has been building throughout 2025 and into 2026. The platform is now fully blocked in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Australia, jurisdictions that imposed restrictions earlier in the platform’s history. Recent additions in 2026 include Portugal, Hungary, and Ukraine alongside Argentina. Colombia was the first Latin American country to implement a full block before Argentina followed.

A separate tier of restriction applies in Singapore, Poland, Thailand, and Taiwan, where users can close existing positions but cannot open new ones. That limited access model reflects regulators in those jurisdictions taking a cautious approach rather than an outright prohibition.

The cumulative effect is significant. Polymarket has built a reputation as one of the most accurate real-time prediction tools available, with USDC settling roughly 98% of its transactions as covered in earlier reporting on Circle’s growth. Its accuracy on events ranging from elections to economic data releases is precisely what makes it valuable and precisely what makes regulators in multiple jurisdictions nervous. A platform that aggregates dispersed information into real-time probability estimates sits uncomfortably between financial derivative and gambling product under most existing legal frameworks, and different countries are resolving that ambiguity in different ways.

The US Is Moving in the Opposite Direction

The contrast with the United States is worth noting. Despite being one of the earliest countries to restrict Polymarket access for its own citizens, US regulators have been shifting toward integrating prediction markets into formal financial oversight frameworks rather than doubling down on prohibition. That approach treats platforms like Polymarket as a category requiring regulation rather than elimination, which is a meaningfully different posture than the court ruling in Buenos Aires.

Whether that regulatory divergence widens or narrows over the next year will have real consequences for the platform’s global viability. Polymarket maintains a live list of restricted regions on its help center, and the list has grown considerably faster in 2026 than in prior years. At 34 countries and counting, the question for the platform is no longer whether restrictions are a problem but whether the remaining accessible markets are large enough to sustain the liquidity that makes its predictions accurate in the first place.

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