Key Highlights
- Former FTX Europe executive Patrick Gruhn launched UpsideOnly through Perpetuals.com.
- Users submit market predictions, while the company funds and executes trades using its own capital.
- Profits are shared with users if their predictions are successful, while losses are absorbed entirely by the company.
Perpetuals.com, led by former FTX Europe executive Patrick Gruhn, on Tuesday launched a new AI-powered trading platform called UpsideOnly that lets users make money from market guesses without risking their own cash.
According to the company, the platform works across big global markets like stocks, crypto, commodities, and forex, and it uses the company’s own money to place real trades based on what users predict will happen.
How UpsideOnly works
Users submit predictions about market direction, such as whether Bitcoin will rise or oil prices will fall. Those predictions are evaluated by BayesShield AI, Perpetuals.com’s proprietary and patent-pending algorithm, which the company says was trained on more than 22 billion historical retail trades.
The firm said this system studies each prediction and decides if it is strong enough to act on. If it is strong, the company uses its own funds to open a real trade. If the trade makes a profit, the user who made the idea gets a share of the profit. If the trade loses money or is not used, the user loses nothing at all.
No deposit needed and bot control
Perpetuals.com says users do not need to deposit money to join or earn rewards. But there is an optional small refundable deposit of $1 or more. This deposit is not used for trading. It is only used to reduce fake accounts and bots.
Those who choose to deposit may also get higher payouts. The company says this money is kept safely in U.S. Treasury bills through an outside trusted manager, and users can take it back anytime.
The AI system behind the platform is already trained on a very large amount of data. The company says BayesShield AI was trained using more than 22 billion completed retail trades.
This helps the system learn how real traders behave in different situations. The AI mixes this learning with human predictions to create better trading signals. As more users join and make predictions, the system keeps learning and improving in real time.
Why the platform was created
According to the release, UpsideOnly is meant to fix a big problem in retail trading. It claims that regular traders often lose money because most trading platforms are set up in a way that users end up on the losing side.
The firm says that retail traders together lose more than $12 billion every year in traditional markets. UpsideOnly tries to change this by removing personal risk and letting users focus only on making predictions instead of risking money.
“The dominant retail trading model is not a tool. It is a trap, designed so the platform wins when you lose.” Gruhn said as he explained the motive behind the platform, “Platforms engineered to extract money from the people who could least afford to lose it, sold to them as investing.”
He said this new model is different because it puts both users and the company on the same side.
Read: Four Years After the FTX Crash, Temasek Still Refuses to Forgive Crypto
Gruhn’s connection with now bankrupt FTX
Gruhn worked as the head of FTX Europe. He became connected with the company in 2021 when it acquired his Swiss company DigitalAssets.AG, which he cofounded.
This was a year before FTX filed for bankruptcy in 2022. The company later filed a lawsuit attempting to claw back over $300 million from Gruhn and his former partners, alleging that Sam Bankman-Fried vastly overpaid for DigitalAssets.AG.
In 2024, the parties reportedly reached a settlement where Gruhn and his co-founders agreed to buy back the European assets for roughly $33 million.
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