Overview: What kind of market is this?

South Korea's gambling-adjacent regulatory environment tightened materially this cycle around a single dominant thread: the treatment of decentralized, blockchain-settled prediction markets as illegal gambling. The Korea Communications Standards Commission's nationwide network-level block of Polymarket, concluding a review opened 21 May 2026, is the first instance of a Korean media watchdog cutting off retail access to this product type at the network level. It sits alongside a parallel criminal probe of domestic Polymarket users opened by the Gangwon Provincial Police Agency, and a wave of Financial Supervisory Service enforcement against payment processors linked to illegal gambling operators. Two forward-looking AML/CFT items — a court-order-free account-freeze bill and a joint FSS/FIU task force preparing for Korea's next FATF mutual evaluation — round out a cycle whose dominant posture is enforcement-led tightening rather than market liberalisation. No change was identified this cycle in the underlying licensing, cost, or player-protection baseline.