POYP and Miraima are testing a narrow legal line in Japan: no cash in, no cash out, and no gambling charge, at least for now.
Japan's prediction market story is not really about whether users can guess the result of a World Cup match. It's about whether a startup can turn betting behavior into a points program and stay outside one of the strictest gambling regimes in a major economy.
According to Bloomberg's reporting, local platforms POYP and Miraima are trying exactly that. You don't wager yen or crypto. You make forecasts, earn platform coins, and redeem them for benefits such as Eraberu Pay gift card vouchers from giftee. That sounds like a small product choice until you put it beside Japan's Penal Code. Then it becomes the whole business model.
Article 185 of Japan's Penal Code makes gambling a crime, with fines of up to 500,000 yen for ordinary gambling unless the wager is only for temporary amusement. Article 186 goes further for habitual gambling and running a place for gambling profit, with prison terms attached. The National Police Agency has also warned Japanese residents that using overseas online casinos can still be illegal even when the operator is licensed abroad. Geography doesn't rescue you if the law treats the bet as happening at home.
That is why Bitbank's move on Polymarket matters. The Japanese crypto exchange said in a June 15 notice that accounts connected to deposits or withdrawals involving prediction market services could face restrictions or suspension. Read that as compliance, not panic. If a prediction market payout is handled in crypto, an exchange becomes part of the path from wager to money, and no responsible exchange wants to be the weak link in that chain.
POYP and Miraima are working around that wall. POYP brands itself as a prediction market tied to points earning, with questions across politics, sports and culture. Miraima, described by Bloomberg as a seven-month-old platform, has offered markets on subjects including whether Japan reaches the FIFA World Cup quarter-finals. The important part is what the platforms say they don't do. They don't take cash stakes, they don't pay cash winnings, and they don't settle in cryptocurrency.
No money in. No money out. That is the bet.
The obvious Japanese precedent is pachinko. Parlors have operated for decades through the three-shop system: players trade balls for prizes, then take those prizes to a separate shop that buys them. Everyone understands the economics. The legal fiction survives because the parlor and the cash exchange are formally separate, and because pachinko was embedded in Japanese consumer life long before app-based prediction markets arrived with slicker interfaces and cleaner data trails.
Points are not steel balls, though. POYP and Miraima may be borrowing the shape of pachinko, but they don't have pachinko's history, political weight or social acceptance. Japan's Financial Services Agency has not issued a public safe harbor blessing points-based prediction markets. There is no formal opinion letter saying this structure works. There is just a gap, and startups are often very good at mistaking a gap for permission.
The Western platforms see the same opening, but they can't move as lightly. Polymarket has appointed Mike Eidlin as its Japan representative and wants regulatory approval before 2030, Bloomberg reported in May. That long runway tells you plenty. Polymarket may have global name recognition and serious financial backing, including investment from Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, but Japan is not a market you enter by turning on local access and hoping the lawyers catch up.
Kalshi faces the same problem. It expanded internationally in October 2025 and says it operates in more than 140 countries, but Japan is different because the gambling question sits right at the center of the product. If users are putting money on uncertain future events, regulators don't need a long philosophical debate to see the risk.
Frankly, the points model is clever enough to last for a while. Japan's regulators have bigger crypto questions on the table, from stablecoin supervision after JPYC's yen-pegged token approval in 2025 to the country's continuing debate over crypto tax treatment. A small platform awarding gift card vouchers is unlikely to become the first fire alarm unless it scales fast or creates obvious consumer harm.
But scale changes the story. If points can be converted easily, traded informally, or priced closely enough to cash, the loyalty program argument starts to look thin. If secondary markets appear, regulators will not need to pretend the platform is still a harmless rewards app. You can call the unit a coin, a point or a voucher. If users treat it like money, the law will eventually notice.
For now, you can go to Miraima and make a forecast about Japan's World Cup chances. You just can't get paid in anything the platform wants to call money. Whether that distinction holds is the only prediction here worth taking seriously.
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