Patrick Gruhn today launched UpsideOnly, an artificial intelligence (AI) trading platform. The marketing rests on a single promise that users “can’t lose.”
Gruhn used to run FTX Europe. In early reactions to today’s launch, that fact is doing more work than the product itself.
An FTX-Built Engine Inside a ‘No Loss’ Pitch
UpsideOnly invites users to submit simulated trades on oil, gold, equities, and crypto. A model picks the ideas it scores as most likely to pay off.
Perpetuals.com, the Nasdaq-listed parent, then runs those trades with its own balance sheet. Signal creators reportedly receive half of any profits, with no exposure when a trade loses.
“People don’t just interact with markets, they react to them. And a lot of that isn’t about skill it’s about how the system behaves underneath. That’s why we approached Perpetuals differently. We treated markets as systems that can be designed, tested, and improved. Because once you look at it that way, it becomes hard to ignore what’s actually broken. A lot of what gets labeled as risk is really just poor infrastructure,” Gruhn said in a recent post.
The model itself is the giveaway. BayesShield AI was trained on more than 11 billion historical trades. The dataset came from FTX Europe’s retail customer base, salvaged before the 2022 collapse.
The engine behind a “no loss” product runs on data from a venue where many users did lose.
A Founder Still Tied to FTX’s Collapse
Gruhn ran FTX’s European arm before the parent exchange imploded, leaving billions in customer claims outstanding. He has publicly stated he was unaware of fraud at the parent firm.
He now positions Perpetuals.com as a regulated alternative, with UpsideOnly as the consumer-facing piece of that pitch.
The “no loss” label, critics argue, describes only the user side of the trade. The publicly listed company absorbs every losing position itself.
Perpetuals.com trades near a $22 million market capitalization with consecutive periods of negative earnings. Skeptics read those numbers as a thinner cushion than the slogan suggests.
UpsideOnly is live for pre-registration as of today, with a broader rollout planned for later in 2026. Retail uptake may hinge less on the AI than on the FTX baggage attached to it.
