The South Korean regulatory agency has implemented access blocking on Polymarket, deeming it to be providing illegal gambling.

BlockBeats News, August 18th. The Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC) held a meeting of the Communications Standards Subcommittee today, where it determined that the overseas prediction market platform Polymarket was engaged in illegal gambling activities and decided to take access blocking measures against it. The committee concluded that Polymarket's business model is based on uncontrollable events for users such as politics, sports, elections, and weather, using a 'winner-takes-all' profit and loss structure that fosters speculative behavior. The platform operators are responsible for market creation, setting trading rules, and overall operational management. They provide a virtual asset acceptance and settlement system, effectively creating an environment for raising and distributing user funds. By earning fees through share trading, they are in violation of the South Korean Criminal Code and the National Sports Promotion Act.

Polymarket had previously argued that the platform operates based on non-custodial peer-to-peer trading and smart contracts, does not directly raise funds, manage funds, or issue sports promotion voting rights. However, the committee responded that relying on technical features such as providing Korean language services, decentralized technology, or centralized trading interfaces cannot evade the application of South Korean domestic laws. Considering that the platform has effectively provided illegal gambling services to Korean users, access blocking is unavoidable to protect domestic users.