Polymarket goes to court to overturn Dutch gambling ban

US prediction platform Polymarket has gone to court in The Hague to overturn a Dutch ban on its services, arguing that it sells financial products, rather than bets.

The company confirmed the case to the Financieele Dagblad. The judges will reportedly be asked to decide whether betting on real-world events counts as gambling, which the Dutch gambling regulator Ksa says that it is.

Polymarket argues that it is more like trading in derivatives, which should be supervised by financial markets regulator AFM.

Polymarket users buy contracts that pay out in USDC, a type of cryptocurrency whose value is equal to the US dollar, if a particular event does or does not happen. The company says this is comparable to futures contracts traded on financial markets.

Fines and bans
The Ksa ordered Polymarket to stop serving Dutch users in an order dated January 20 and made public on February 17. It said the platform was offering games of chance without a licence and threatened a penalty of €420,000 a week, up to a maximum of €840,000.

Polymarket stopped Dutch users from placing bets later in February, but the regulator ruled it had acted too late and in May demanded €420,000, and rejected the company’s objection in June.

The platform drew widespread attention in the Netherlands after users staked millions of dollars on the outcome of the October 2025 general election.

Only sport
According to the Ksa, Dutch law only allows betting on sport, so a licence would not be an option for Polymarket either.

“Prediction markets are on the rise, in the Netherlands too,” Ksa director Ella Seijsener said in a statement in February. “These types of companies offer bets which are not allowed on our market under any circumstances, not even by licence holders.”

Last week, MPs voted down a motion from the far-right Forum for Democracy (FvD) asking the government to look into regulating prediction markets as a separate category within gambling law.

Gambling lawyer Micha Schimmel told the FD he gives Polymarket’s case little chance. He pointed to a 2015 ruling which found that a service can be a financial product and still count as gambling. Polymarket is also banned in France and Germany.