Mario Nawfal’s viral interview casts Patrick Gruhn as one of the few FTX insiders who not only survived but materially profited from the wreckage.
Summary
- Gruhn sold his firm to FTX for about $400 million and later repurchased FTX Europe’s assets for roughly $32.7 million after bankruptcy
- His new platform UpsideOnly executes trades with company funds and shares profits with users but absorbs all losses itself
- The AI engine behind UpsideOnly is trained on more than 22 billion retail trades and aims to fix structural traps that wipe out 95 percent of traders
Patrick Gruhn, the former CEO of FTX Europe who sold his business to Sam Bankman Fried’s empire for around $400 million before buying it back for roughly $30 million after the collapse, is now pitching a “you never lose” AI trading platform called UpsideOnly that uses only company capital to place trades on user predictions.
US court filings later described the deal as part of a roughly $376 million spending spree to secure a European license.
After the exchange imploded, the FTX estate sued to claw back hundreds of millions, but ultimately agreed to sell FTX Europe’s assets back to Gruhn and co founder Robin Matzke for $32.7 million under a February 2024 settlement reported by the Wall Street Journal and others.
How did Patrick Gruhn turn a $400M FTX saga into UpsideOnly’s ‘risk free’ pitch?
In the interview, Nawfal summarizes the arc with tabloid clarity, saying Gruhn “sold his company to FTX for $400 million before it collapsed, watched it implode, then bought it back for $30 million,” before pivoting to tout UpsideOnly as “the most interesting idea in trading right now.”
Gruhn, who previously outlined FTX Europe’s ambitions to dominate derivatives and win retail traders across the bloc in an Insider profile, now leans on that history to argue that the problem was not leverage or innovation but how platforms weaponized both against their own customers.
In Nawfal’s telling, Gruhn’s take is unsparing on his former partners: “FTX would probably be bigger than Binance today if Sam Bankman Fried hadn’t destroyed the company,” and what happened was “not outright fraud from day one, it was embezzlement, the same thing banks do legally, except FTX wasn’t a bank.”
What is UpsideOnly and can ‘you never lose’ trading actually work?
UpsideOnly, built under the Nasdaq listed Perpetuals.com umbrella, is described in the interview as a trading and market prediction platform where “you trade with their money, lose nothing if you’re wrong, split the profits 50 50 if you’re right.”
A recent launch release says Perpetuals has trained its proprietary BayesShield AI engine “on more than 22 billion retail trades,” combining that dataset with crowd signals from users who make directional calls across equities, crypto, commodities and forex without putting up their own capital.
According to Perpetuals, “UpsideOnly is the first of its kind a risk free platform to predict markets utilizing proprietary AI trained on more than 22 billion retail trades to ensure users can never lose money, only win it,” because “users never put up their own money for trading” and “Perpetuals trades exclusively with the company’s own capital.”
If a trade wins, Perpetuals shares profits with the users whose predictions contributed to that decision, but if it loses “the user loses nothing,” a structure Gruhn contrasts with conventional derivatives venues that he says sell “desperate people the dream of escaping financial pressure overnight” and then leave them “structurally doomed against market makers and professional liquidity providers.”
Nawfal’s interview notes that UpsideOnly’s pitch rests on a sharp division of labor between humans and machines, with Gruhn arguing that “humans are actually much better at identifying entry points than exit points, which is where AI takes over,” and claiming that most traders “lock in tiny wins but refuse to accept losses until they get wiped out.”
The clip also veers into outright indictment of leverage casinos, with timestamps flagging segments on “suicides, addiction and financial ruin caused by predatory trading platforms and influencers,” and the claim that “casinos actually give people far better odds than crypto leverage trading platforms,” a comparison that echoes prior crypto market outlook coverage on systemic retail losses.
Perpetuals’ own disclaimer is the tell: if a “you never lose” platform openly worries about its regulatory treatment, model risk, and capital sustainability, the more realistic base case is not that it has solved market psychology but that it is rehypothecating it in a new wrapper.
However the BayesShield engine is configured, underwriting retail error at scale in pursuit of edge extracted from the same pathologies that blew users up on FTX and Binance looks less like a consumer fix and more like a sophisticated principal book waiting for a bad regime shift, a liquidity crunch, or a model miss to expose where the losses really sit.
In that sense, UpsideOnly does not so much abolish the house as move it off-screen, asking traders to trust a balance sheet, an AI stack, and a risk committee that will almost certainly not feel “risk-free” the first time a fat-tail event arrives and the company has to decide whether to keep eating losses or quietly rewrite the rules.
