Episode 23: Silliness In Prediction Markets About Spotify

Did you know you can bet on Kalshi on how many Spotify streams artists will get? Well, of course you can, because you can bet on almost anything on Kalshi. But what happens when someone tries to manipulate the streaming metrics? We found that out last week! Daniel O’Boyle of InGame helps break down the latest nonsense.First, this at The Event Horizonhttps://nexteventhorizon.substack.com/p/how-artificial-spotify-streams-broke-kalshi-marketHere’s from a story on Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/spotify-streaming-manipulation-prediction-markets-polymarket-kalshi/This week, the situation hit a boiling point when the song “Earrings” by Malcolm Todd surged to number one on a Spotify chart. In a series of X posts, Davies outlined his suspected culprit: “botting,” or scammers who purchase bots to juice streaming numbers. Davies argued that prediction market traders were botting the charts to influence the outcome of related events contracts. Todd’s song was such an underdog that it wasn’t even listed as an option on Polymarket: “Looking at the dataset of Sunday to Monday changes, it was a 11.24 sigma event, or a roughly 1 in 77 octillion chance of happening randomly,” Davies wrote.- Things start getting serious for Kalshi and everyone else in Michigan: https://www.ingame.com/kalshi-sports-contracts-banned-michigan/- Everything else in US is a rounding error: https://nexteventhorizon.substack.com/p/how-much-kalshi-trading-is-there-outside-of-sports This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nexteventhorizon.substack.com