ASIC Says No: Prediction Markets Face Australian Blockade
Australia's securities regulator has drawn a line under prediction markets. ASIC chair Sarah Court, in a blog post published last Friday, said the commission "is not currently convinced that prediction markets for retail clients are in the public interest." Careful wording. The intent behind it isn't hard to read.
Court went further, framing the products as betting in all but name. "Prediction market contracts have all the features of a bet," she said. Event contracts, she added, often "have nothing to do with investment," and she pointed to sporting results as the clearest example. That line matters. It answers the question the sector has spent years trying to avoid: is an event contract a financial product or a wager? ASIC's answer is the second one.
Which puts Australia at odds with the US federal position. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has backed operators including Kalshi, Polymarket, Crypto.com and Robinhood. State authorities have gone the other way. Arizona and Utah have both filed criminal charges against Kalshi, which carries a valuation above $40bn. The split isn't tidy, and it isn't close to resolved.
Some jurisdictions have started treating prediction markets as their own category rather than forcing them into either box. Gibraltar got there first. Tobique in Canada and Nevis in the Caribbean have followed. Europe's larger markets remain cold: gambling regulators in France, the Netherlands and Portugal have all spoken against the products. Polymarket, chasing a $21bn valuation, has reportedly been talking to the UK's Financial Conduct Authority and the EU's European Securities and Markets Authority in an effort to shift that mood.
The Australian objection rests on market integrity as much as classification. Court flagged the potential for misuse of confidential information, manipulation, and disputes over how event outcomes get determined. Those are real operational problems, not theoretical ones. Anyone who has run a markets product knows settlement is where the arguments start, and an event contract with a fuzzy resolution clause is a complaint waiting to happen.
There's a practical warning too, for Australian customers and the firms serving them. "Australians who choose to access offshore prediction markets directly online should be aware that they do not have protections under Australian law," Court said. For licensees, the message was just as direct: facilitating access to offshore prediction markets doesn't dilute their obligations, which continue to apply to that activity.
For affiliates, the read is straightforward. Traffic pointing Australian users at offshore event contracts now sits in a grey zone that ASIC has explicitly flagged, and the compliance risk runs to the licensee, not just the platform. Operators with Australian-facing inventory should be auditing where those clicks land.
Prediction markets may keep winning ground in the US and pick up licences in smaller jurisdictions. Australia won't be one of them any time soon. Kalshi and Polymarket have no appetite for gambling oversight, which means they need securities regulators like ASIC on side. On Court's comments, they don't have it. And there's no date on the table for a rethink.