Patrick Gruhn (패트릭 그룬), a former head of FTX's European business, has unveiled an artificial intelligence-based trading platform that touts profits without losses. Market reaction is mixed as questions emerge about the service structure and the use of data from his time at FTX.

On May 19, blockchain outlet BeInCrypto reported that Gruhn, a former head of FTX Europe, launched an AI trading platform called UpsideOnly.

UpsideOnly operates by having users submit simulated trade ideas on oil, gold, stocks and cryptocurrencies, among other assets, while the AI filters signals with higher profit potential. The actual trades are executed by the listed company Perpetuals.com using its own funds.

The core of the platform is that users do not put in investment capital themselves. If a trade selected by the AI generates a profit, the user who proposed the signal takes half of the gains. If a loss occurs, the user does not bear it. Gruhn promotes this as a structure in which “users cannot lose.”

Market attention, however, is focused more on Gruhn’s past than on the service structure. He oversaw FTX’s European business, which collapsed in 2022. After FTX’s bankruptcy, customers suffered losses worth billions of dollars, and Gruhn has said he did not know about fraud at the parent-company level at the time.

The AI model has also become a subject of controversy. VeShield AI, UpsideOnly’s core engine, was trained on more than 11 billion historical trades, and much of the data is reported to have been obtained from FTX Europe’s customer base. That means trading data accumulated before FTX’s collapse was used to train the current AI model.

Some in the industry have pointed out that “it is ironic that a platform that claims loss-free investing is based on exchange data from a place where massive losses occurred in the past.”

In a recently published post, Gruhn criticised the structure of existing financial markets. “People are reacting to markets rather than interacting with them,” he wrote, adding that “the problem lies in the structure of the system rather than individual ability.” He said Perpetuals.com views the market as a system that can be designed, tested and improved, and explained that what is often called “risk” is in effect the result of poor financial infrastructure.

Critics, however, say the platform has not removed real risk but has simply shifted it from users to the company. That is because all losing positions are reflected on Perpetuals.com’s balance sheet.

The company’s financial strength is also a concern. Perpetuals.com’s market capitalisation is reported to be about $22 million, and it has recorded consecutive losses until recently. The market is questioning whether the company can sustain a structure that absorbs losses over a long period.

Gruhn is positioning Perpetuals.com as a regulated alternative finance platform and says UpsideOnly is an example of delivering it as a mass-market service. Industry observers say whether the service spreads will depend less on AI performance than on how much his FTX-linked past weighs on trust.

UpsideOnly is currently taking pre-registrations, with a full service expansion scheduled for the second half of 2026. Market attention is expected to focus on the scale of user inflows and whether the company can sustainably operate a structure that absorbs losses.