You don't usually see "former FTX executive" and "no loss" in the same sentence, much less the same product, and that's what makes Patrick Gruhn's new platform such an unusual launch.
Gruhn, who ran FTX's European arm before it imploded with the rest of the exchange, launched UpsideOnly through his post-FTX company Perpetuals.com Ltd, with the pitch that users place pretend trades, an AI picks the best ones, the house bets real money on them, and winners split the profit while losers lose nothing.
Users on UpsideOnly call directions on assets like oil, gold, equities, and crypto without risking their own capital, since the trades are paper. A proprietary AI Perpetuals calls BayesShield, trained on more than 22 billion historical retail trades, scores the predictions and picks the ones it thinks have an edge.
The company then trades those forecasts using its own balance sheet. If the trade wins, Perpetuals shares half the profit with the user who generated the signal, and if it loses, the user owes nothing.
Gruhn says the model flips the usual setup - in which U.S. retail traders hand over more than $12 billion a year to brokerages designed to win when they lose - into one where the platform and the trader sit on the same side of the table.
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Gruhn and co-founder Robin Matzke ran Digital Assets, a European derivatives shop that Sam Bankman-Fried bought in 2021 and rebranded as FTX EU. After FTX collapsed and went bankrupt, the pair fought a long legal battle to buy back the European assets and rebuild under the Perpetuals.com brand.
The parent company now trades on Nasdaq under the ticker PDC, after listing on January 20, 2026. That history is the obvious sticking point for any investor sizing up the launch.
UpsideOnly's structure - crowd-sourced trading signals, AI execution, and profits paid only when the house wins - is novel enough on its own. Coming from a former FTX EU executive, it's the kind of pitch that gets a slower second read.
The product either works or it doesn't, and the track record will show up faster than the brand can outrun it.
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