Lithuania blocks Polymarket and orders payment firms to cut off Adventure One

Lithuania's Gaming Control Authority says it investigated Polymarket and obtained a Regional Administrative Court decision allowing access to the site to be blocked. The authority then issued mandatory instructions to communications providers covering polymarket.com. It separately directed payment service providers to stop payments involving Adventure One QSS, Inc., the operator named in the notice.

Those are related but different interventions. The access measure is intended to make the site unavailable through ordinary Lithuanian internet connections. The payment instruction targets transactions with the named operator. Neither statement proves that every technical route has disappeared or that customer money has been confiscated.

The paired approach also reduces the risk of reading a domain block as the whole remedy. A user may reach a service through a workaround while regulated payment providers remain under a separate instruction. Conversely, a stopped transaction does not prove that every page or informational function is inaccessible.

LPT says users could create an account, deposit funds and make predictions about real events at a predetermined coefficient, with the outcome determining whether they won or lost the deposited amount. The authority concluded that these features matched gambling and betting characteristics and said the service operated without the Lithuanian licence or permit required for that activity.

That is the regulator's legal characterisation of the product offered into Lithuania. The public notice is not a universal ruling on every event contract or prediction platform. Product design, local access and national definitions still matter, which is why the named site, operator and jurisdiction must stay attached to the conclusion.

The authority describes Polymarket as the first prediction-market website blocked in Lithuania. In the same notice, it says a total of 2,204 illegal remote-gambling websites had been blocked by 8 September. Those figures cannot be combined: 2,204 is the wider remote-gambling total, not a count of prediction markets.

The distinction matters because the larger number provides enforcement context without proving that Lithuania has previously taken the same approach to this product category. The novelty claimed by the authority is narrower and more useful: the first access block of this type, paired with a named payment restriction.

The official announcement reports a court decision supporting access blocking and administrative instructions to providers. It does not announce a criminal conviction, a fine or a final judgment on damages. Describing the action as a ban is therefore incomplete unless the practical scope is stated: Lithuanian access to the named domain and payments involving the named operator.

A later appeal could test the classification or procedure. Provider implementation could also show how the two restrictions work in practice. Until either document appears, the confirmed position is that the regulator has moved from assessment to active disruption of the service in Lithuania.

The absence of the underlying judgment from the announcement also limits what can be said about reasoning, duration and appeal rights. Atlas therefore treats the regulator's account as confirmation of the action, not as a substitute for legal analysis of an unpublished court text.

The Lithuanian action follows national measures elsewhere, including France's order to internet providers and Dutch collection proceedings against Adventure One. The legal mechanisms are not interchangeable. Lithuania's announcement expressly connects a court-backed domain block with payment-provider instructions, while other authorities have used their own administrative routes.

For operators and commercial partners, the lesson is operational rather than rhetorical. A platform label cannot replace a country-by-country check of access, product classification, licence status and payment exposure. The next decisive record here is the underlying court decision or any appeal, not another general prediction-market statement.