Gemhalla

What is Gemhalla?

“We have tried hard to protect all our sites and the colleagues who work in them, but the combined impact of higher employer National Insurance contributions, wage inflation, increases in gambling taxes and wider economic uncertainty has left us with no choice,” said Chief Executive Jo Whittaker in a statement to iGB at the time the closures were announced.

Evoke also closed 200 of its William Hill stores in April of this year for the same reason.

Stella David, CEO of Entain, has also warned against the potential rise of MGD to Entain’s operations, forecasting a increamse of £100 million in operational costs, if the policy were to go through. 

About Gemhalla

At the same time, prediction market operators are facing regulatory tussles in the US. State regulators are moving to shut down the firms under gambling laws. The companies say their contracts should be regulated at the federal level as derivatives. 

However, the sector has grown substantially despite such disputes. Bernstein predicted in April that annual prediction market volume could reach $1 trillion by 2030. The research estimated volume was around $51 billion in 2025 and could grow to around $240 billion in 2026. 

The partnership with Yahoo Finance wraps up as prediction markets push for broader distribution across financial media, sports, and entertainment platforms. For Polymarket, the loss of the Yahoo Finance hub is one distribution channel, but other partnerships remain intact.

How to play Gemhalla

The focus is on identifying illegal and unregulated gambling sites, operators that offer gambling services without the necessary licence, as well as sites that misuse, copy, or falsely refer to other operators’ licences.

“You can try to stop gambling, but then you go onto foreign gambling sites and crypto casinos and they keep appearing,” Madsen says.

He began watching regulators shut down individual gambling sites, only for mirror sites, cloned domains and replacement URLs to emerge in thier place. The problem, he concluded, was not necessarily the individual website. It was the network behind it.