Gibraltar Hosts Europe’s First Prediction Markets Summit as Sole Licensing Jurisdiction

Gibraltar hosted Europe’s first dedicated prediction markets summit this week in Ocean Village, signaling its intent to serve as the regulated hub for the vertical on a continent otherwise set against it. The PX Markets Summit Europe, organized by Eventus International, featured Nigel Feetham, Gibraltar’s justice, trade and industry minister, opening proceedings. Andrew Lyman, the territory’s gambling commissioner, told iGaming Business that “Gibraltar has already moved from the theoretical to the practical application of a regulatory regime.”

Since licensing Predict Street in the spring and introducing dedicated rules in July, Gibraltar has authorized a second operator and holds a limited number of pipeline applications. The attendee list underscored the sector’s early stage: lawyers, compliance consultants, start-ups, and harm-reduction groups such as BetBlocker, with no participation from Polymarket, Kalshi, or Predict Street itself.

Regulatory Resistance Across Europe

Nine regulators from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland issued a joint warning against unlicensed prediction markets during the World Cup, the first coordinated continental action on the issue. Spain blocked Polymarket and Kalshi in May, with its regulator repeating last week that such operators cannot legally serve Spanish customers. Germany’s GGL placed the topic on the agenda for a European regulators’ roundtable on 4 November. ESMA has separately warned that certain prediction-market contracts may constitute binary options barred for ordinary investors.

At SiGMA World in Rome, Francesca Broggi, vice-president of Italian operator association LOGiCO, called prediction markets “fairly destructive” to licensed concessionaires, citing unequal tax and licensing burdens. Other voices on the same panel, including from Blockchain.com and Blockchain Italia, called for an EU framework blending crypto, financial, and gambling rules, noting the product is “neither fish nor fowl” yet offers opportunity for those who adapt.

Gibraltar’s Limits and Head Start

Lyman identified the core difficulty as the classification fight, stating that ESMA’s binary-options comparison “disregards structural differences.” While the argument continues, he said, Gibraltar “has been agile enough to fashion a workable regime” with market, consumer, and anti-money-laundering protections. A Gibraltar licence, however, buys no automatic passport into other markets. Operators “still need to lawfully enter other markets on an incremental basis” through local licences or commercial partnerships.

The jurisdiction has executed this model before, first with online gambling and later with its 2018 distributed-ledger framework for crypto firms. Lyman conceded a single EU framework could emerge but observed that “whereas small states can be agile, the opposite is true in the EU,” particularly where some states “may prefer to elongate the debate.” Whether larger markets eventually open will determine if Gibraltar’s early licensees gain substantial customers or remain well-regulated with limited reach.