Polymarket Traders Saw The Weeknd Beating Drake On Spotify Wrapped Before Anyone Else
Hours before Spotify officially dropped its 2025 Wrapped results, traders on crypto prediction platform Polymarket were already acting as if they knew the outcome. Odds that The Weeknd would finish third on Spotify Wrapped rocketed from around 40% to near-certainty at 99%, long before the streaming giant made anything public.
Polymarket promoted the move on X as a victory for prediction markets, suggesting it showed how “the crowd” can anticipate real-world results. But replies under its own post told a different story. One user, @FhantomBets, called it a “leak,” likening the situation to the Nobel Prize prediction incident in October and saying traders were using “the same trick.”
On LinkedIn, commentator Itay Yakobov dubbed it “The $3,162,695 Backend Heist.” He claimed that savvy users scraped a publicly accessible WordPress file connected to a staging API on Spotify’s newsroom site. According to this account, the backend data showed Drake slipping from third to fourth place after Spotify allegedly removed suspected bot streams, clearing the way for The Weeknd to take the spot.
Trader @IwqanBJZ, known as Suhaan, argued that this was not collective intelligence but simple endpoint hunting. He shared a screenshot from Fireplace Pro, a third-party Polymarket analytics dashboard, indicating one account buying The Weeknd shares at just over $0.036 and walking away with more than $12,000 in profit. Other wallets appeared to show gains above $20,000 and $17,000, suggesting multiple traders may have acted on the same information.
Spotify’s newsroom does appear to be powered by WordPress, with public references to a Google Cloud bucket labeled “pr-newsroom-wp.” However, the specific endpoint described in posts could not be independently confirmed, and whether it contained Wrapped rankings remains unclear. Spotify has not responded to requests for comment, leaving open questions about data security, market integrity, and how far “prediction” really went.