Polymarket Faces New Roadblock As Dutch Regulator Bans Prediction Activity — Details

bitcoinistPubblicato 2026-02-22Pubblicato ultima volta 2026-02-22

Introduzione

Polymarket's Dutch operations, under the entity Adventure One, have been ordered to cease all activities by the Netherlands Gambling Authority (Ksa) for offering unlicensed prediction markets, which the regulator classifies as illegal gambling. The platform faces potential fines of up to $840,000 per week for non-compliance. This action is the latest regulatory challenge for Polymarket, creating a conflict between US federal approval and state-level scrutiny. The news coincides with a recent parliamentary proposal in the Netherlands to introduce a controversial 36% tax on unrealized gains from cryptocurrencies and other investments, a move critics warn could drive investors out of the country.

According to recent reports, the Dutch arm of the prediction markets platform Polymarket has been asked to cease its activities in the Netherlands. This order comes as the latest regulatory blow dealt to the prediction market platform in recent weeks.

Dutch Regulator Threatens Polymarket With $840,000 Fine

In a notice dated Tuesday, February 17, the Netherlands Gambling Authority ordered Polymarket’s Dutch arm, Adventure One, to “cease its activities immediately” or risk incurring up to $840,000 in fines per week. According to the Dutch regulator, Adventure One offered illegal bets, including on the local elections, to residents without a license.

While prediction markets do not particularly fall into the traditional gambling category, the Netherlands Gambling Authority has classified them as betting. The regulator revealed that it contacted Polymarket about its activities on the Dutch market, but have seen no corrective action or response from the prediction markets company.

Netherlands Gambling Authority’s director of licensing and supervision, Ella Seijsener, said in the notice:

Prediction markets are on the rise, including in the Netherlands. These types of companies offer bets that are not permitted in our market under any circumstances, not even by license holders. Besides the social risks of these kinds of predictions (for example, the potential influence on elections), we conclude that this constitutes illegal gambling. Anyone without a Ksa license has no business in our market. This also applies to these new gambling platforms.

This restriction in the Netherlands marks the latest stumbling block for Polymarket in terms of regulation over the past few months. Despite receiving approvals from the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), individual state authorities have placed significant scrutiny on the activities of prediction market platforms.

This has led to an issue of jurisdiction, as the CFTC chair criticized the state-level scrutiny which undermines their federal authority over prediction markets.

Dutch Unrealized Gains Tax On Crypto Rolls On

This crackdown on prediction markets comes just a week after the Dutch House of Representatives advanced a proposal to introduce a 36% capital gains tax on most liquid investments, including cryptocurrencies. This controversial bill, if passed, would see profits made from interest-bearing financial instruments, equity investments, cryptocurrencies, and savings accounts be subject to tax, whether realized or not.

The proposal of this capital gains tax led to interesting reactions, with several crypto analysts noting that the legislation will drive investors out of the Netherlands. “To be honest, the fact that there’s the unrealized gains tax for Bitcoin in the Netherlands is the dumbest thing I’ve seen in a long time. The amount of people willing to flee the country is going to be bananas,” analyst Michaël van de Poppe said on X.

The price of BTC on the daily timeframe | Source: BTCUSDT chart on TradingView

Domande pertinenti

QWhat action did the Dutch Gambling Authority take against Polymarket's Dutch arm, Adventure One?

AThe Dutch Gambling Authority ordered Adventure One to cease its activities immediately or face fines of up to $840,000 per week.

QWhat was the primary reason given by the Dutch regulator for banning Polymarket's activities?

AThe regulator classified Polymarket's prediction markets as illegal gambling, stating they offered bets that are not permitted in the Dutch market without a license, including on events like local elections.

QHow did the director of licensing, Ella Seijsener, justify the crackdown on prediction markets?

AElla Seijsener stated that prediction markets offer illegal bets, pose social risks such as potential influence on elections, and constitute illegal gambling that requires a license to operate in the Netherlands.

QWhat recent tax proposal in the Netherlands has also impacted the crypto space?

AThe Dutch House of Representatives advanced a proposal to introduce a 36% capital gains tax on most liquid investments, including cryptocurrencies, taxing both realized and unrealized gains.

QWhat concern did crypto analyst Michaël van de Poppe raise about the proposed Dutch tax on unrealized crypto gains?

AMichaël van de Poppe called the tax 'the dumbest thing I’ve seen in a long time' and predicted that it would cause a significant number of people to flee the country.

Letture associate

Two Legends Lost in Three Days: Is Google's AI Talent Dam Cracking?

In three days, Google lost two AI legends. On June 18, Noam Shazeer, co-author of the seminal "Attention is All You Need" paper and Gemini co-lead, left for OpenAI. Just 48 hours later, John Jumper, 2024 Nobel laureate and AlphaFold lead, departed DeepMind for Anthropic. This follows Andrej Karpathy joining Anthropic in May. These moves highlight a structural trend: top AI talent is concentrating at mission-driven, pre-IPO firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, while Google becomes a primary source. The exodus stems from a core mission mismatch. Google's ad-centric model often subordinates AI research to product and revenue goals, creating friction for pioneers like Shazeer, who returned in 2024 only to leave again. In contrast, OpenAI and Anthropic offer singular focus on pushing AI boundaries, whether towards AGI or safety-aligned models, which deeply appeals to top researchers like Jumper. Financial incentives amplify the pull. With both OpenAI and Anthropic nearing IPO, employees stand to gain immensely from equity, an upside Google's mature stock cannot match. Furthermore, the 2023 merger of Google Brain and DeepMind, intended to consolidate strength, has instead created cultural tension and slowed the path from research to product, as evidenced by Gemini's pace. This talent redistribution is reshaping the AI landscape. While Google retains vast data and compute resources, its true crisis is the quiet, continuous loss of the people who define the field's future. The real moat in AI is not infrastructure, but the concentration of brilliant minds—a battle Google is currently losing.

marsbit35 min fa

Two Legends Lost in Three Days: Is Google's AI Talent Dam Cracking?

marsbit35 min fa

Behind the AI Report Card, Lies a Chinese 'Exam Setter'

Beyond the familiar performance charts like MMLU-Pro and MMMU, which major AI models strive to ace, stands a key "examiner": Chinese-Canadian researcher Wenhu Chen. An assistant professor at the University of Waterloo and founder of TIGERLab, Chen addresses the crucial need for more rigorous AI evaluation. As models like GPT-4 began scoring near-perfect results on older benchmarks like MMLU, it became difficult to distinguish their true capabilities. In response, Chen introduced MMLU-Pro in 2024, featuring harder, more reasoning-focused questions with more answer choices, successfully reintroducing meaningful performance gaps. His work extends to multi-modal evaluation with MMMU and its enhanced version, MMMU-Pro. These benchmarks test a model's ability to understand and reason with complex information from images, charts, and text across diverse academic subjects, exposing the significant challenges even top models face in genuine comprehension. Chen's background in complex QA, table reasoning, and his experience at Google DeepMind on projects like Gemini inform his approach. He understands that effective benchmarks must anticipate how models might "cheat" by memorizing data or avoiding visual analysis. His lab also actively researches video understanding and generation models (e.g., UniVideo, Vamba), ensuring his evaluation work is grounded in practical model-building challenges. Now at Meta's Super Intelligence Lab, Chen continues his focus on multi-modal data and evaluation, representing the deep yet often unseen contributions of Chinese talent in shaping the fundamental tools of the AI industry.

marsbit47 min fa

Behind the AI Report Card, Lies a Chinese 'Exam Setter'

marsbit47 min fa

Alliance Co-founder's Letter to Entrepreneurs: Written at the Moment Cursor Sold for $600 Billion

Alliance Co-founder's Letter to Entrepreneurs: On Cursor's $60 Billion Sale Many aspiring founders see massive exits like Cursor's $60B sale and wonder why they can't achieve the same, often concluding opportunities are exhausted. But great companies aren't built in obvious, crowded spaces. Cursor, like Stripe, Figma, and Shopify before it, started with a non-consensus belief about the future. Before ChatGPT, they believed AI would transform knowledge work. They focused on a genuinely exciting domain, became their own customer, and obsessed over power users. Their journey involved years of "glass-chewing" effort before the market was ready. The pattern is consistent: identify a long-term technological shift, find a missed entry point, and execute for years before the trend becomes obvious. First-generation products (PayPal, Adobe, Amazon) prove a market exists. Second-generation winners (Stripe, Figma, Shopify) rebuild that market around new insights, technology, or changing customer behaviors. Founders must identify their phase in the cycle. Early entrants like Coinbase or Cursor focus on making new technology usable for power users. Later entrants find the "yin" to the established "yang"—the blind spots incumbents miss as they grow distant from individual users. The key is deep market immersion. Use every product in your space. Talk to users. Build an audience. Stop looking for ideas and start *seeing* them everywhere. Then, choose one. The idea must offer a 10x improvement or solve a "hair-on-fire" pain point—something severe enough that users are already crafting workarounds. When building, avoid feature bloat. Ask: why would someone switch? Great startups rarely force new behaviors; they improve familiar workflows with drastically lower friction (e.g., Cursor forked VS Code instead of creating a new editor). Distribution is the underestimated moat. Before product-market fit, achieve distribution-market fit. How do customers discover new tools? Founders like those at Airbnb, Stripe, and Cursor did unscalable, manual work to recruit early users. The final, unteachable ingredient is resilience. Cursor built for years pre-market, faced rejection, and persisted. So did Airbnb, Nvidia, and Rain (which launched post-FTX collapse). The lesson isn't that these founders were smarter, but that they stayed in the game long enough for their insights to compound. Framework: Spot technological cycles. Cultivate unique insight. Obsess over your market. Talk to customers. Find a hair-on-fire problem. Build the simplest wedge. Win your distribution channel. Above all, don't quit when it gets hard. Most people won't do these things consistently. The few who do build the next generation of great companies. Go build.

marsbit51 min fa

Alliance Co-founder's Letter to Entrepreneurs: Written at the Moment Cursor Sold for $600 Billion

marsbit51 min fa

Weekly Editor's Picks (0613-0619)

Weekly Editor's Picks (0613-0619): Market Insights & Analysis This weekly digest curates in-depth analysis often lost in the information flow, focusing on key insights across macro trends, investment, and technology. **Macro & Geopolitics:** With the Strait of Hormuz reopening and military conflict shifting to negotiation, markets are pivoting from "war shock" to "supply restoration." Trades include shorting crude risk premiums, longing airlines/tourism, Asian energy importers, and bond duration, while shorting inflation expectations. LNG, fertilizer, and chemical chains are also being repriced. **Investment & VC:** Ray Dalio advises against betting on concentrated AI giants dominating indices, advocating for diversified portfolios of high-quality, low-correlation assets instead. Analysis covers the 4-year crypto cycle, predicting the core surviving product by 2029 will be asset trading markets. Current BTC metrics suggest a potential bottoming zone, presenting a patient accumulation window. SpaceX's high-profile IPO at a $2.1T valuation faces scrutiny over fundamentals, with key watchpoints being its likely inclusion in the Nasdaq index and Q2 earnings. Concerns are raised about potential "gamma squeeze" and systemic risks if its narrative-driven valuation gets amplified by passive index funds. Robinhood (HOOD) is noted for breaking its high correlation with crypto, bolstered by its stock trading and new underwriting business. **Web3 & AI:** A warning highlights ~$1.8T in off-balance-sheet AI infrastructure commitments (purchase commitments, leases) as a potential systemic risk if AI monetization lags. AI models are being used for World Cup predictions, adding a new layer for betting markets. A cost breakdown of a $20 AI subscription reveals the supply chain from model companies to cloud, GPUs, and power. **Prediction Markets:** The emergence of prediction market "concept stocks" is noted, with Robinhood developing its own platform, Rothera, signaling a shift from market competition to a "channel war" for user access. **CeFi & DeFi:** The SpaceX IPO tested perpetual contract mechanisms for pre-IPO assets, highlighting challenges in handling corporate actions like stock splits on-chain. The de-pegging of STRC (Strategy's preferred share) to ~$89 reflects market concerns over MicroStrategy's capital structure and BTC-backed leverage model. BlackRock's covered-call Bitcoin ETF (BITA) offers yield but caps upside, appealing to yield-seeking institutions. **Ethereum:** An opinion piece argues Ethereum's core strength is its vast developer community and composability, solidifying its role as the default operating system for the financial internet. **Weekly Hot Topics:** Include the US-Iran deal reopening the Strait of Hormuz, Fed's hawkish hold, Anthropic restricting model access, SpaceX acquiring Cursor, and a humorous stock surge for "Liuliumei" due to its "LLM" ticker.

marsbit55 min fa

Alliance's Co-Founder's Letter to Entrepreneurs: Written on the Occasion of Cursor's $60 Billion Sale

In this letter to entrepreneurs, Alliance reflects on the success of Cursor's $60 billion sale to Elon Musk, using it as a case study to counter the misconception that opportunities in crowded fields like AI or crypto are exhausted. The piece argues that great companies like Cursor, Stripe, Figma, and Shopify are not built by geniuses with perfect ideas, but by founders who start with a non-consensus belief about the future and build for years before that future becomes obvious to everyone. They identify long-term shifts, find overlooked entry points, and execute relentlessly. The framework for success involves: 1. **Identifying your place in the technology cycle**: Early-stage opportunities focus on making new tech usable for power users (e.g., Coinbase, Cursor). Later-stage opportunities involve finding the "yin" to an existing "yang"—the blind spots of first-generation players (e.g., Stripe vs. PayPal, Figma vs. Adobe). 2. **Cultivating unique insights**: Immerse yourself deeply in the market. Use every product, talk to users, and build an audience. Insights will emerge naturally from deep engagement. 3. **Finding a "hair-on-fire" problem**: Look for a 10x improvement or a severe, urgent pain point. The strongest signal is people already building clumsy workarounds. 4. **Building a focused MVP**: Don't just add features because you can. Ask why users would abandon their current tool for yours. The best startups rarely force new behaviors; they improve familiar workflows with drastically lower friction. 5. **Winning a distribution channel**: Distribution is often the moat. Before product-market fit, achieve channel-market fit. Find where your customers are and build an engine to reach them, even through unscalable, manual efforts initially. 6. **Persistence**: The final, unteachable ingredient is resilience. Success stories like Cursor, Airbnb, and Nvidia involved years of grinding, rejection, and perseverance when the path forward seemed unclear. The conclusion is that there is no secret. Most people fail to consistently execute these steps over the long term. The few who do build the companies that define the next era. The world is yours to create.

链捕手1 h fa

Alliance's Co-Founder's Letter to Entrepreneurs: Written on the Occasion of Cursor's $60 Billion Sale

链捕手1 h fa

Trading

Spot

Futures