Argentina ordered a nationwide block of Polymarket in mid-March 2026, following a scandal in which the global prediction platform appeared to anticipate the country's official Consumer Price Index (CPI) figure for February, at least 15 minutes before the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos (INDEC) published it.
The episode exposed what market participants described as a serious data leak from within the Government's statistical apparatus, and it put a spotlight on a regulatory gap that local gambling authorities moved swiftly to close.
The February CPI came in at 2.9% monthly, above the 2.7% consensus forecast from consultancies polled by the Central Bank in its Market Expectations Survey. For the general public, the number was confirmed at 4pm on a Thursday. For a segment of financial operators, it had apparently been circulating since at least 2:30pm.
An unnamed experienced trader told Argentinian outlet Ámbito that the figure had been available to some market participants roughly an hour before official publication, noting that the same pattern had occurred the previous month with identical precision.
The implications for Polymarket were visible in the data. Between 3:30pm and 4:00pm, betting activity on the 2.8%-to-3% inflation range surged sharply on the platform. IT expert Fernando Molina traced three digital wallets that had placed bets in the 30 minutes prior to the official announcement. Two of the wallets staked $2,000 each and one staked $500, in stark contrast to their prior activity, where no individual bet had exceeded $10. One of those accounts had registered a 100% success rate on the sole inflation market it had ever bet on.
The financial market showed similar movement. Some inflation-linked bonds gained up to 0.6% during the same window, while fixed-rate Treasury bills declined, a rotation consistent with traders repositioning ahead of a higher-than-expected number.
A structural problem, not an isolated incident
To understand why Argentina's inflation figure commands this level of attention, and why a leak carries such financial weight, it helps to understand the role inflation plays in Argentinian society. In 2024, Argentina recorded an average annual inflation rate of 178%, the highest in the world and the country's worst in over three decades, fueled in part by a 50% currency devaluation shortly after President Javier Milei took office in December 2023.
Prices had surged over 3,000% annually during the hyperinflationary crisis of the late 1980s. The CPI release is, in that context, not a routine statistical publication; it is a monthly referendum on whether the country's economic situation is improving or deteriorating.
Controlling inflation has been a central campaign promise in virtually every Argentinian Presidential Election in recent memory, and Milei's own ascent to the Presidency was driven substantially by his promise to bring price stability through radical fiscal adjustment.
The monthly INDEC release is therefore one of the most politically and financially sensitive data points in the country. According to INDEC's own internal protocol, technical departments circulate the data 48 hours in advance to the publication unit that prepares the press release.
On the day of publication, the agency head typically forwards the figure to the Ministry of Economy and the Central Bank before it goes public. That chain of custody, multiple institutions, multiple hands, is where the leak appears to have originated. However, the Comisión Nacional de Valores (CNV) confirmed only that market investigations are confidential by law and declined to comment further.
Blocking Polymarket addresses the gambling dimension. It does nothing about the informational asymmetry that made the episode possible in the first place
The block and its reasoning
Argentina's Buenos Aires City judiciary ordered the block of Polymarket following a complaint filed by Lotería de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (LOTBA), later joined by the Cámara Argentina de Salas de Casinos, Bingos y Anexos (CASCBA), both arguing the platform was operating without the required authorization.
The ruling also cited the platform's structural characteristics: it accepted cryptocurrency and credit card payments, required no identity or age verification, and allowed account creation within minutes; all of which, the court found, significantly increased user risk.
Argentina is not alone in arriving at that conclusion. As of February 2026, Polymarket faced access restrictions across dozens of jurisdictions, as regulators increasingly moved to classify prediction markets as unlicensed gambling. Indeed, it is a scenario many other countries – and US states – will already be familiar with.
In France, Autorité Nationale des Jeux was among the regulators to take action, moving to block access after authorities determined that the platform’s political event markets, including those tied to the 2024 US presidential election, which attracted tens of millions of dollars in trading volume, fell within the scope of unauthorized betting activity.
Poland, Switzerland, Italy, Romania and Singapore followed with their own enforcement actions, each citing the absence of local licenses and the classification of event contracts as betting activity under domestic law. Portugal and Hungary moved simultaneously in January 2026, with Portuguese regulators explicitly citing a national prohibition on wagering on political events.
The recurring justification across jurisdictions is the same: prediction markets occupy a legal grey area that most regulators are no longer willing to tolerate. In Argentina's case, the concern went one step further: the platform had not simply enabled gambling on a historically sensitive economic indicator; it had apparently become a vehicle for insider trading.
What the episode reveals
When a segment of the market can price a government statistic before it is public, those without access to that information absorb the full impact of the surprise. In Argentina's case, that surprise was an upside deviation from consensus that moved bond markets, repositioned portfolios and, apparently, paid out on a prediction platform; all before most citizens knew what the number, or even a prediction market, was.
Blocking Polymarket addresses the gambling dimension. It does nothing about the informational asymmetry that made the episode possible in the first place. In a country where the monthly CPI release carries the weight of a macroeconomic verdict, a recurring data leak does not just raise questions about institutional integrity; it adds another structural layer to an already uneven playing field.
Argentina’s unusually swift response shows how quickly authorities can move when a platform falls within a clear regulatory perimeter. But it also exposes the limits of that approach: shutting down access is immediate, correcting the imbalance in who holds market-moving information is not.
Despite cases like that of Argentina, the NBA was this week linked to potential collaborations with none other than Polymarket and Kalshi
