Mario Nawfal’s viral interview casts Patrick Gruhn as one of many few FTX insiders who not solely survived however materially profited from the wreckage.
Patrick Gruhn, the previous CEO of FTX Europe who bought his enterprise to Sam Bankman Fried’s empire for round $400 million earlier than shopping for it again for roughly $30 million after the collapse, is now pitching a “you by no means lose” AI buying and selling platform referred to as UpsideOnly that makes use of solely firm capital to put trades on person predictions.
US court docket filings later described the deal as a part of a roughly $376 million spending spree to safe a European license.
After the trade imploded, the FTX property sued to claw again a whole bunch of thousands and thousands, however in the end agreed to promote FTX Europe’s belongings again to Gruhn and co founder Robin Matzke for $32.7 million underneath a February 2024 settlement reported by the Wall Road Journal and others.
How did Patrick Gruhn flip a $400M FTX saga into UpsideOnly’s ‘threat free’ pitch?
Within the interview, Nawfal summarizes the arc with tabloid readability, saying Gruhn “bought his firm to FTX for $400 million earlier than it collapsed, watched it implode, then purchased it again for $30 million,” earlier than pivoting to tout UpsideOnly as “essentially the most fascinating concept in buying and selling proper now.”
Gruhn, who beforehand outlined FTX Europe’s ambitions to dominate derivatives and win retail merchants throughout the bloc in an Insider profile, now leans on that historical past to argue that the issue was not leverage or innovation however how platforms weaponized each in opposition to their very own prospects.
In Nawfal’s telling, Gruhn’s take is unsparing on his former companions: “FTX would in all probability be greater than Binance immediately if Sam Bankman Fried hadn’t destroyed the corporate,” and what occurred was “not outright fraud from day one, it was embezzlement, the identical factor banks do legally, besides FTX wasn’t a financial institution.”
What’s UpsideOnly and might ‘you by no means lose’ buying and selling truly work?
UpsideOnly, constructed underneath the Nasdaq listed Perpetuals.com umbrella, is described within the interview as a buying and selling and market prediction platform the place “you commerce with their cash, lose nothing in the event you’re improper, cut up the income 50 50 in the event you’re proper.”
INTERVIEW: Patrick Gruhn was the CEO of FTX Europe. He bought his firm to FTX for $400 million earlier than it collapsed, watched it implode, then purchased it again for $30 million.
Now he is constructed one thing that is perhaps essentially the most fascinating concept in buying and selling proper now.
His firm… pic.twitter.com/3swlvUSJ91
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) Might 21, 2026
A latest launch launch says Perpetuals has educated its proprietary BayesShield AI engine “on greater than 22 billion retail trades,” combining that dataset with crowd alerts from customers who make directional calls throughout equities, crypto, commodities and foreign exchange with out placing up their very own capital.
In accordance with Perpetuals, “UpsideOnly is the primary of its form a threat free platform to foretell markets using proprietary AI educated on greater than 22 billion retail trades to make sure customers can by no means lose cash, solely win it,” as a result of “customers by no means put up their very own cash for buying and selling” and “Perpetuals trades solely with the corporate’s personal capital.”
If a commerce wins, Perpetuals shares income with the customers whose predictions contributed to that call, but when it loses “the person loses nothing,” a construction Gruhn contrasts with typical derivatives venues that he says promote “determined folks the dream of escaping monetary stress in a single day” after which depart them “structurally doomed in opposition to market makers {and professional} liquidity suppliers.”
Nawfal’s interview notes that UpsideOnly’s pitch rests on a pointy division of labor between people and machines, with Gruhn arguing that “people are literally a lot better at figuring out entry factors than exit factors, which is the place AI takes over,” and claiming that the majority merchants “lock in tiny wins however refuse to simply accept losses till they get worn out.”
The clip additionally veers into outright indictment of leverage casinos, with timestamps flagging segments on “suicides, dependancy and monetary damage attributable to predatory buying and selling platforms and influencers,” and the declare that “casinos truly give folks much better odds than crypto leverage buying and selling platforms,” a comparability that echoes prior crypto market outlook protection on systemic retail losses.
Perpetuals’ personal disclaimer is the inform: if a “you by no means lose” platform overtly worries about its regulatory remedy, mannequin threat, and capital sustainability, the extra life like base case just isn’t that it has solved market psychology however that it’s rehypothecating it in a brand new wrapper.
Nevertheless the BayesShield engine is configured, underwriting retail error at scale in pursuit of edge extracted from the identical pathologies that blew customers up on FTX and Binance appears much less like a shopper repair and extra like a complicated principal guide ready for a foul regime shift, a liquidity crunch, or a mannequin miss to show the place the losses actually sit.
In that sense, UpsideOnly doesn’t a lot abolish the home as transfer it off-screen, asking merchants to belief a stability sheet, an AI stack, and a threat committee that may nearly actually not really feel “risk-free” the primary time a fat-tail occasion arrives and the corporate has to resolve whether or not to maintain consuming losses or quietly rewrite the principles.
