Someone created a Polymarket contract on May 21 asking whether Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto would leave office before his term ends in 2029. The contract attracted bets immediately. Indonesian social media picked it up within hours. By May 22, the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs, known as Komdigi, had blocked polymarket.com at the ISP level across the entire country.
Twenty-four hours. That is how fast a government can move when a prediction market touches domestic politics.
The Contract That Triggered It
The market was straightforward: will Prabowo Subianto leave the presidency before 2029? Yes or no. In a country where gambling is illegal under both civil and religious law, letting foreigners bet real money on the president’s tenure was never going to go unnoticed.
Alexander Sabar, Director General of Digital Space Supervision at Komdigi, did not leave room for interpretation. “The government will not allow any form of online gambling in Indonesia,” he said. Activities involving “betting and speculation over events that are inconclusive” violate Indonesian law regardless of whether they use blockchain infrastructure.
Second Asian Ban in One Week
Indonesia is the second Asian country to block Polymarket in seven days. India blocked the platform on May 22 after MeitY classified it as illegal online gambling. Kalshi was reportedly next. Now Indonesia has done the same thing for a different reason: not just gambling laws, but political sensitivity. India blocked Polymarket because it is gambling. Indonesia blocked it because it is gambling about the president.
The pattern is accelerating. Brazil banned prediction markets in April. France has been tightening crypto-adjacent gambling regulations all year. Two of Asia’s three largest populations by internet users, India and Indonesia, are now dark. Combined, that is 840 million internet users who cannot access Polymarket without a VPN.
33,000 Bank Accounts Frozen This Year
The Polymarket block is not an isolated action. Indonesia has been running a sustained crackdown on online betting throughout 2026. Authorities have frozen over 33,000 bank accounts linked to gambling activity. Millions of gambling-related domains have been blocked. The country treats online betting as both a legal and cultural issue: Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, with roughly 280 million people, and gambling is prohibited under both civil and Islamic law.
Komdigi said it is also tracing social media accounts affiliated with Polymarket to enforce a more complete ban across platforms. That means not just blocking the site, but going after the promotion layer too.
Polymarket’s Asia Strategy Is Collapsing in Real Time
Polymarket processed $25.7 billion in volume in March alone, twelve times the previous year. The growth was built on global access. Two weeks of Asian bans are testing whether that access can survive regulatory pushback.
The platform told Bloomberg it is targeting Japan for approval by 2030. That is a four-year timeline for a single market. Meanwhile, the markets it already had are disappearing. Polymarket is simultaneously facing a Congressional insider trading probe in the U.S., a $700,000 exploit on Polygon, and now bans in two of Asia’s largest countries. New competitors with proper licensing are entering the space, and they are not waiting for Polymarket to figure out its regulatory position.
Polymarket doubled its valuation to $22 billion in five months. That valuation assumed global reach. Every country that blocks the platform chips away at the assumption. The question Polymarket needs to answer is no longer “how big can we get” but “how many markets can we lose before the model breaks.”
