Brazil has formally declared prediction markets illegal and started blocking platforms that offer them, in one of the clearest moves yet to draw a hard line around what falls inside the country’s betting and financial rules. The government said the products are not covered by Brazil’s fixed-odds betting law and cannot be presented as lawful derivatives either.
The decision closes off a lane that had started to attract attention in Brazil just as the country was trying to settle its newly regulated betting market. Officials said the concern was not only legal classification, but also the risk of creating another uncontrolled market aimed at Brazilian consumers.
The government says event contracts fall outside both legal tracks
At the center of the move is Resolution No. 5,298, approved by the National Monetary Council on April 24. The rule says derivative contracts in Brazil cannot be based on sports events, online gaming, or political, electoral, social, cultural, or entertainment outcomes. In practice, that strips prediction-style contracts of any claim to sit inside the country’s legal derivatives market.
The Finance Ministry also published Technical Note SPA/MF No. 2958 on April 23, stating that so-called prediction markets amount to illegal fixed-odds betting when they target Brazilian users without authorization under Law 14.790. That gives the government two legal pillars for the crackdown: they are not valid derivatives, and they are not licensed betting products either.
Site blocking has already started
Officials said the telecoms regulator Anatel had already moved to block dozens of platforms. Reuters reported that the initial figure given at the press conference was 28, though the Finance Ministry later revised that number to 27. Either way, the government made clear that more blocks will follow if similar services keep appearing.
That approach fits the way Brazil has handled illegal betting more broadly. The Finance Ministry said earlier efforts against unauthorized gambling had already led to the blocking of more than 39,000 websites, and it is now applying the same enforcement logic to prediction-style products.
Brazil is tightening the edges of its legal betting market
The broader message from Brasília is that Law 14.790 covers fixed-odds sports betting and online gaming, but not every wager-like product that tries to enter the market under a different label. The government is still refining the boundaries of the legal system it launched in 2025, and this is part of that work.
For operators, the warning is straightforward. If a product looks like betting and sits outside the rules Brazil has already written, the government is not treating it as a loophole. It is treating it as illegal.
