Platforms POYP and Miraima are routing around Japan's strict gambling laws by swapping cash payouts for redeemable points and gift card vouchers, borrowing a legal structure the country perfected seventy years ago with pachinko.
Bloomberg confirmed the story today: prediction markets are emerging in Japan, but you won't be wagering crypto or yen. Instead, you'll be earning coins redeemable for Eraberu Pay gift cards by giftee. It sounds like a minor technical distinction. Under Japanese law, it's the difference between a startup and a criminal prosecution.
Japan's Penal Code Article 185 is blunt. Gambling on uncertain events carries fines up to 500,000 yen and, for operators, jail terms of up to five years. The National Police Agency has made equally clear that accessing legally operated foreign gambling platforms is still a crime for Japanese residents, geography be damned. When Bitbank, one of Japan's major crypto exchanges, froze accounts tied to Polymarket on June 15 and posted a formal notice warning that any deposits or withdrawals connected to prediction market services could trigger full account suspension, it wasn't overcautious compliance theater. It was the exchange reading the law correctly.
That's the wall POYP and Miraima are working around. POYP, which brands itself as "prediction market x points-earning," lets users forecast outcomes across politics, sports, and culture, and converts correct calls into coins redeemable for third-party benefits. Miraima, a seven-month-old platform, runs a similar structure with questions ranging from FIFA World Cup quarter-final outcomes to news and entertainment events. Neither platform touches cash or cryptocurrency on entry or exit. No money in, no money out, no gambling charge , at least in theory.
The model they're borrowing from has a long track record. Pachinko parlors have operated inside this same legal fiction for decades through what's known as the three-shop system: players exchange steel balls for prizes like cigarette lighters or pens, walk next door to a legally separate shop, and trade those prizes for cash. Everyone in Japan understands what's happening. The arrangement survives because the cash exchange happens at a technically distinct entity, which keeps the parlor itself compliant. Japan's courts and regulators have tolerated this structure because it was economically embedded and socially normalized long before anyone thought to challenge it.
POYP and Miraima are betting the same logic holds for loyalty points. They may be right, but don't mistake tolerated for settled. Japan's Financial Services Agency has issued no formal guidance blessing the points-based prediction market structure. There is no regulatory opinion letter, no safe harbor framework. What these platforms have is an absence of explicit prohibition, which is a meaningfully different thing. The pachinko system survived partly because it predated modern gambling enforcement and had fifty years of institutional inertia behind it. A seven-month-old prediction market app has neither.
The broader international ambitions of the two dominant Western prediction market platforms run directly into this dynamic. Polymarket has appointed Mike Eidlin as its Japan representative and is targeting regulatory approval by 2030, according to Bloomberg's May reporting. That's a four-year runway, which tells you everything about how difficult the company expects the regulatory path to be. The Intercontinental Exchange, which owns the New York Stock Exchange, has now put roughly $1.6 billion into Polymarket across two rounds, so the pressure to open large markets is real. Japan recorded a 120% year-on-year increase in on-chain value received through mid-2025, the fastest growth rate in Asia-Pacific. Leaving that market to domestic workarounds is expensive.
Kalshi, which went international in October 2025 and now operates in over 140 countries, faces the same wall. Neither platform is currently available to Japanese users; Polymarket geoblocks Japanese IP addresses explicitly. The domestic startups filling that gap are doing so on a legal foundation that could shift without much warning.
Frankly, the points model is probably durable enough to last, at least for now. Japan's regulators move slowly, and the FSA has spent 2026 focused on stablecoin classification rules and a landmark amendment to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act that would cut crypto tax rates to a flat 20%. Prediction markets are not at the top of that agenda. POYP and Miraima will likely operate in a gray zone for years before anyone forces the question.
But that gray zone has limits. If either platform scales meaningfully, if the points become liquid enough to function like currency, if a secondary market emerges for them, the legal calculus changes. The pachinko three-shop system survived because the prize shops stayed small and informal enough to look like prize shops. The moment these platforms look like financial infrastructure, they stop looking like a loyalty program. Japan's regulators have shown they're willing to move fast when they decide something is financial infrastructure rather than something adjacent to it; the stablecoin rules effective June 2026 are proof of that.
For now, you can go to Miraima and bet on whether Japan reaches the World Cup quarter-finals. You just can't get paid in anything you'd call money. Whether that distinction holds under scrutiny is the only prediction on the platform that really matters.
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