Spotify Confirms Streaming Fraud After Kalshi Trader Cries Foul
Spotify has asked Kalshi and Polymarket to remove its logo and clarify that neither company has a partnership with the company after it identified users manipulating rankings to win prediction market bets. Spotify spotted and removed over 500,000 artificial streams that had unexpectedly turned Malcolm Todd’s song “Earrings” into one of the most popular songs on its charts. The artificial numbers had already been used to settle a Kalshi market tied to the most frequently streamed Spotify song in the US in June, which had attracted $3 million in trading. Read more →
ETF buyers return
After a brutal June, U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs finally caught a bid. The funds took in about $222 million on July 2, breaking a 10-day outflow streak that had drained more than $2.7 billion. Fidelity’s FBTC led the rebound, while Ark/21Shares also saw strong inflows. The catch is that BlackRock’s IBIT was still negative, losing another $40 million and extending its own outflow streak to 11 days. Read more →
Cloudflare adds stablecoin paywalls
Cloudflare, which handles roughly a fifth of global internet traffic, opened a waitlist for a new Monetization Gateway that lets websites, APIs, datasets and MCP tools charge for access using stablecoins. The payments run through x402, a Coinbase-developed web payments protocol built around the old HTTP “402 Payment Required” code. Circle’s USDC has been the main stablecoin associated with x402 so far, though Cloudflare has not yet disclosed full asset or chain support. Read more →
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