Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1544987
20 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 17 MAY 2026 FEATURE ANNOUNCEMENT OF A CALL FOR PROJECT PROPOSALS UNDER European Social Fund+ 2021-2027 The Ministry responsible for European Funds would like to announce that it is launching a call for project proposals for Non-Governmental Organisations/Voluntary Organisations and Social Partners in the following area: Priority 2 - Fostering Active Inclusion for All Specific Objective: 4.8 – Active inclusion and employability Specific Objective: 4.11 – Equal access to quality social and healthcare services The call will close on Monday, 22 nd June 2026 at noon. The online application form for the submission of project proposals and supporting documentation are available on https://fondi.eu/what-funding-is-available/. Prospective Applicants are encouraged to refer to the European Social Fund+ Programme and the Eligibility Guidance Notes in order to check whether their proposals are eligible for funding through this call for project proposals. Further information on this call and on the European Structural and Investment Funds may be obtained from https://fondi.eu/. Any query should be sent by email on fondi.eu@gov.mt. A dedicated information session is being organised on Thursday 28th May 2026 from 15:00 till 18:00 at the offices of Servizzi Ewropej f'Malta – 280, Republic Street, Valletta. Registration for the information session can be done by scanning the below QR code. Betting on democracy: How prediction ELECTION 2026 MALTESE voters will head to the polls on 30 May to decide who governs the country for the next five years. But on one corner of the internet, the re- sult has already been priced in. On the world's largest pre- diction market platform, Poly- market, 92% of traders believe Robert Abela will remain prime minister. The Nationalist Par- ty's Alex Borg has seen his odds fall by 42% since the market opened on 1 May. Prediction markets allow us- ers to trade on the outcome of real-world events, elections, economic indicators, and sports results, turning fore- casting into a financial instru- ment. The concept is simple. A market poses a question: Who will be Malta's next prime min- ister? Users buy shares in the outcome they think is most likely. A share in Robert Abela trading at 90 cents means the market assigns a 90% probabil- ity to that outcome. If he wins, the share pays out one dollar. If he loses, it pays out nothing. There are currently four mar- kets on Polymarket centred on Malta's general election: Who will be the next prime minis- ter; which party wins the most seats; which party comes third; and what the voter turnout will be. Across all four, roughly $230,000 have been traded since early May. By Polymar- ket standards, that is small, the platform handles billions in volume on its bigger markets, but it is enough to sketch a pic- ture of what traders currently think about the Maltese elec- tion. That picture is one-sided. La- bour is priced at 92% to win the most seats. Abela is at 92% to remain prime minister. A market on a third seat in par- liament has put ADPD at 54%, whilst Momentum, who were at 80% a week ago, has fallen to 36%. On turnout, 49% of traders believe it will fall below 85% whilst a fifth market on the margin of victory puts Labour winning by between 5 and 10 percentage points at 37% How it works To place a bet on Polymarket, you sign up with an email ad- dress, fund your account with USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, and pick a mar- ket. Trades settle automatically through a smart contract on the Polygon blockchain. No human at Polymarket process- es your bet. The code handles it. The use of cryptocurrency is deliberate. Traditional pay- ment methods can be blocked by regulators, but crypto is much harder to stop. A Bitcoin and cybersecurity educator based in Malta puts it plainly: "Polymarket is, at its core, a betting platform, and it is extremely hard for a bet- ting company that wants to scale globally to comply with the regulatory requirements of every jurisdiction. By accepting only crypto, Polymarket effec- tively opens its services to most of the world." The source flags an important catch about how decentralised Polymarket actually is. When users sign up with an email, the private key for their wallet is not generated by them but generated and managed by a third-party service called Mag- ic Labs, which Polymarket uses for email-based logins. Magic stores these keys in encrypted form on AWS infrastructure. This introduces a layer of trust in a third party, which many do not know exists. So, while the underlying smart contracts are genuinely on-chain and Polymarket it- self cannot directly freeze your funds, the email signup intro- duces a layer of trust in a third party that most users do not realise exists, they say. Several European countries, France, Germany, Italy, Po- land, Portugal, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Belgium, have already classified Poly- market as unlicensed gambling and geo-blocked it. Malta has not. The platform remains free- ly accessible on the island, and while Economy Minister Silvio Schembri has said the govern- ment is exploring a regulatory framework for prediction mar- kets, no such framework exists yet. JULIANA ZAMMIT jzammit@mediatoday.com.mt