Brazil bans online gambling less than two years after legalising it

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva suspended all online gambling and betting in Brazil, reversing a regulated market that launched in January 2025 after years of legislative effort.

The suspension takes effect immediately. No transition period was announced. Brazil had been one of the most closely watched emerging gambling markets, with dozens of international operators having entered since regulation passed.

The reversal comes less than twenty months into the regulated era. No official statement has detailed which specific harms or operators triggered the decision, though criticism of the sector's social costs had grown steadily since launch.

For international operators who entered the Brazilian market and for prediction market platforms watching regulatory sentiment in large emerging economies, the speed of the reversal is the operative fact: a regulated market was built, licensed, and then suspended within a single electoral cycle.

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Eleanor Ashworth

Senior Markets Analyst

Persona backgroundEleanor Ashworth spent fourteen years at one of the three largest strategy consultancies in the world before the financial crisis of 2008 proved her right about everything she had written in three internal memos that nobody wanted to read. She was not one of the people who was wrong.