Polymarket seeks Japan approval in global market push

Polymarket is seeking approval to operate in Japan, extending the prediction-markets platform’s overseas push as Washington still debates how event-contract venues should be supervised, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.

Bloomberg said the company has appointed a representative in Japan and is preparing to lobby for authorization of prediction markets there. A successful push would show whether a platform built around event contracts can win a place inside a large, rules-based financial market.

The Japan effort matters because it turns an abstract policy debate into a live regulatory test. For Polymarket, it offers another route into a major market after years of friction with U.S. officials. For regulators, it sharpens a classification question: whether prediction markets belong under gambling rules, derivatives-style oversight or a separate framework.

The argument is already underway in the United States. Reuters reported in September that Polymarket had received a green light from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission to return to the American market after more than three years away. Reuters reported again in March that the agency was expected to advance a proposal for regulating prediction markets, suggesting the fight had moved from enforcement to rulemaking.

Scale has made that fight harder to sidestep. Reuters reported last week that monthly notional trading volume across Polymarket’s offshore exchange and its U.S. platform reached $10.3 billion in April, up from $3.8 billion a year earlier. The same report said the company was seeking a $15 billion valuation in fresh funding talks.

The policy concerns are not theoretical. Charles Martineau, a professor at the University of Toronto’s business school, told Reuters that prediction markets pose a distinct risk when traders may sit closer to the underlying event than they would in equities.

“If someone has insider information, they might be way more inclined to act on it on prediction markets than on equity markets.”

— Charles Martineau, Reuters

Traditional exchanges can point to listing standards, issuer disclosure and surveillance systems built over decades. Prediction-market operators still need to show that similar controls can work when the underlying event is an election, court ruling or policy decision rather than a listed security.

Why Japan matters

Japan would be a meaningful test because it is a large, rules-based market rather than a lightly regulated outpost. Bloomberg’s report did not say when a filing might come or what form an approval request would take. Even so, progress there would help Polymarket argue that event contracts can fit inside established financial oversight.

That would also give the company a cross-border reference point while Washington is still deciding how to treat the product. U.S. officials would still face the same questions on surveillance, contract design and who should be allowed to trade what, but a live Japan process would make those questions harder to defer.

For now, the report looks less like a near-term launch plan than another step in a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction legitimacy campaign. Japan will not settle the broader fight over prediction markets on its own, but approval there would be a clear sign that regulators are starting to treat the category as a financial product rather than an edge case.