Key Takeaways
- Polymarket added voluntary self-exclusion on 30 September 2026, running from 30 days to a lifetime, alongside deposit limits that apply immediately when lowered but need a cooling-off period before they can be raised or removed, and a clinical treatment partnership with Birches Health covering all 50 US states.
- A cross-platform exclusion list for prediction markets already exists. IC360’s SelfExclude is fully integrated with Kalshi and Novig, and its own site still lists Polymarket as in progress, while Polymarket’s announcement names no shared register at all.
- In Great Britain and Australia, self-exclusion is a register every licensee must check. In prediction markets it is a setting inside one company’s product, which is how a Pennsylvania man barred from DraftKings and FanDuel through his state scheme went on to lose $25,000 on Kalshi.
What did Polymarket actually add on 30 September 2026?
Polymarket added self-exclusion, deposit limits and a route to clinical addiction treatment, and no law required any of it. The announcement of 30 September 2026 lets a trader exclude themselves for 30 days, for a year, or for life. It also lets them set daily, weekly or monthly deposit caps across every funding method, and it puts Birches Health in front of them for a clinical assessment and a treatment plan in any of the 50 states. [1]
The deposit limit mechanics are the part a compliance lead will recognise, because a reduction takes effect at once while raising or removing a limit goes through a cooling-off period first, which is the same shape the Gambling Commission settled on for gross deposit limits in Great Britain, where the second phase of RTS 12 came into force on 30 September 2026 with a 24-hour delay on any increase. [11] Malea Otranto, Polymarket’s global head of trust and safety, put the reasoning plainly: “People should be able to set their own limits, step away on their own terms, and know what the rules are.” [1] On the international platform the exclusion covers trading and perpetuals. [2]
I have listened to this industry argue for most of a decade that these tools are a cost of holding a licence rather than a product decision. A company being sued by the State of New York for running an unlicensed gambling business has now shipped most of them by choice, which is not how that argument was supposed to end up.
Why does a platform-only exclusion matter when a shared list already exists?
It matters because an exclusion that reaches one company is a product feature rather than a protection, and the prediction market sector has already built the alternative. IC360 runs SelfExclude, a voluntary cross-platform list where a user verifies their identity once through Veriff, picks a period of one, three, six or twelve months, and is blocked at every partnered venue within 24 hours, with platforms querying a hashed record so they never receive the name, address or ID details behind it. [3]
Kalshi and Novig are fully integrated. SelfExclude’s own site lists Polymarket, Robinhood, ProphetX, Matchbook and Juice Exchange as in progress. [3] Polymarket’s release of 30 September mentions neither SelfExclude nor IC360 nor any other shared register, and describes exclusion from the platform. [1] [2]
So the longest exclusion a prediction market trader can currently set, Polymarket’s lifetime option, is also the one that reaches the fewest venues, while the shared list that reaches several of them stops at a year. I do not know whether that is a deliberate choice or just two workstreams that have not met yet, and it would be unfair to assume the worst of a team that has clearly done real work here. The architecture is still the thing that decides whether a customer who wants to stop can.
How does this compare with the registers operators already have to check?
Self-exclusion means three different things depending on who has to check it, and the difference is legal rather than technical.
| Market or sector | Scheme | Must operators check it? | How far it reaches |
| Great Britain | GAMSTOP | Yes. Social responsibility code provision 3.5.5 of the LCCP requires licensees to participate in the national multi-operator self-exclusion scheme, with a short list of exempt licence types. [6] | Every remote operator licensed in Great Britain |
| Australia | BetStop | Yes. All licensed interactive wagering services, under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 as amended in December 2019. [8] | Every licensed online and phone wagering provider, with 59,830 people registered since the 21 August 2023 launch. [7] |
| United States | State schemes, for example Pennsylvania’s | Yes, but only for operators licensed by that state. | State-licensed sportsbooks and casinos only, not exchanges regulated by the CFTC. [5] |
| Prediction markets | SelfExclude, run by IC360 | No. Voluntary. | Kalshi and Novig today, with five more platforms listed as in progress. [3] |
| Polymarket | Its own in-product setting | No. Voluntary. | Polymarket. [1] [2] |
Why should an operator with a licence care what an exchange does?
Because the customers walking out of a licensed business are walking into these venues, and there is now a documented case of it. Reporting on one 35-year-old Pennsylvania man, who works in financial services and filed for bankruptcy in late 2023, describes him enrolling in his state self-exclusion scheme, being successfully barred from DraftKings and FanDuel, then finding Kalshi through an Instagram advert offering a $20 bonus and losing $25,000 on 15-minute bitcoin contracts, on top of more than $50,000 already gone. A counsellor quoted in the same piece described those short contracts as “no different than a slot machine in your pocket”. [5] His state scheme worked exactly as designed, and it made no difference.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission opened an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking on prediction markets on 12 March 2026, covering how the statutory core principles and Commission regulations apply to them. [9] Rulemaking of that kind tends to codify whatever the market has already built voluntarily, so the design Polymarket shipped last week is a reasonable guess at the floor, and a platform-only exclusion is a low floor.
Meanwhile, the classification fight is nowhere near settled. The Third Circuit held in April 2026 that the CFTC’s jurisdiction was likely exclusive, and the Ninth Circuit went the other way in August. Attorney General Letitia James and Governor Hochul then sued Polymarket on 24 September 2026, seeking an order to stop it operating unlicensed in New York, restitution for users and fines at three times its gains, and their complaint also says 18 to 20 year olds were trading where the state requires 21 for mobile sports betting. [10] An operator cannot wait for all of that to resolve before deciding whether its own exclusion holds, because the comparison a regulator or a select committee eventually makes will be between architectures, not between press releases.
Boardroom Questions
- Which register does our self-exclusion write to in each licensed market, and can anyone in the room name it without looking it up?
- When a customer excludes with us, which venues can they still reach the same afternoon, and have we ever written that list down?
- Has the exclusion been tested with a real excluded identity rather than a test account, and what was the date of the last test?
- If a regulator asked for every customer who excluded in the last 12 months and then turned up in an affiliate or payment record elsewhere, could we produce that?
- Does our marketing suppression follow the person or the brand, and what happens to it when the same product is gambling in one of our markets and a financial contract in another?
- What would we have to change if the exclusion and cooling-off design an unlicensed competitor shipped voluntarily became the written standard in our largest market?
What should an operator do next?
The next action is a leakage map, one per licensed market, and it is an afternoon’s work rather than a project. Write down every register the business writes to and every venue that checks it. Then write down the venues a customer excluded through that register can still reach: operators licensed in a neighbouring market taking the same currency and payment methods, platforms regulated as financial venues rather than gambling ones, exchanges offering event contracts, and social or sweepstakes products sitting outside the licence altogether.
Against each venue, record whether it checks the register, whether anybody has tested that it does, and when. Then put the customer’s own view beside it, which is simply the list of brands they can still deposit with after telling you they want to stop. The gap between those two lists is the figure to take to a board, and it is hard to argue with, because it is only a list of names.
Sources
1. Polymarket, “Polymarket Launches New User Protections and Trust & Safety Program”, press release, 30 September 2026, PR Newswire.
2. European Gaming, “Self-exclusion and addiction support come to Polymarket”, 2 October 2026.
3. IC360, SelfExclude, selfexclude.io, programme description, participating platforms, enrolment and hashed matching, accessed 6 October 2026.
4. Gaming America, “Prediction markets move toward national self-exclusion program”, on Kalshi’s integration of SelfExclude, 14 April 2026.
5. RG.org, reporting on a Pennsylvania self-excluded bettor’s losses on Kalshi, including quoted comment from counsellor Abdullah Mahmood.
6. Gambling Commission, Licence conditions and codes of practice, social responsibility code provision 3.5.5, remote multi-operator self-exclusion.
7. Australian Communications and Media Authority, BetStop National Self-Exclusion Register statistics, Q3 2025-26, published April 2026.
8. Australian Communications and Media Authority, BetStop National Self-Exclusion Register, on the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 as amended in December 2019.
9. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Release 9194-26, “CFTC Seeks Public Comment on Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Relating to Prediction Markets”, 12 March 2026, 91 FR 12516.
10. Office of the New York State Attorney General, “Attorney General James and Governor Hochul Announce Lawsuit Against Polymarket for Running Illegal Gambling Operation”, 24 September 2026. 11. Gambling Commission, Remote gambling and software technical standards, RTS 12 on financial limits, second phase in force 30 September 2026, including the 24-hour delay before