Perpetuals.com,
the Nasdaq-listed firm run by former FTX Europe boss Patrick Gruhn, says its
new UpsideOnly platform drew more than 30,000 active users and $4.5 billion in
trading volume in its first two weeks. There is a catch worth stating up front:
none of that money was real.
Users do
not trade their own capital. They forecast moves in assets like gold, Bitcoin
and major stocks using virtual money, and the company turns those predictions
into trades with its own funds, keeping half of any profit for users and
covering any losses itself.
In written
responses to questions from FinanceMagnates.com, Perpetuals defended both that
structure and the way it sells the product. “Perpetuals generates revenue
from its own proprietary trading, not from users,” Jason Alderman, the
company’s Chief Communications Officer (CMO), commented.
The product
sits in a fast-growing slice of retail finance where brokers and prop firms use
prediction features to reach younger traders, while prediction markets become a Gen Z
entry point to trading.
In
Perpetuals’ account, gold led at $1.4 billion in paper volume, ahead of Bitcoin
at $1.2 billion, with precious metals near 35% of activity across 186,000 fills
and 25 instruments.
Those are
simulated figures, showing what users chose to bet on rather than where real
money moved.
Perpetuals
sells UpsideOnly as an AI-powered prop trading platform. Its own terms call it
an online prediction analytics game and trading simulation platform.
Asked why
the two descriptions differ, the company said they cover separate parts of the
same operation. “The two descriptions refer to different aspects of the
same model,” said Alderman.
The game
label, Alderman added, reflects the user experience and the platform’s legal
structure, while the prop trading label describes how the company uses player
signals to trade its own money. Users, he continued, do not buy real stocks,
derivatives or any other instruments.
The CMO
said the platform is open to users in the EU and the US, and that it works as a
prediction game rather than a brokerage or managed account.
The
compliance language in the announcement, citing MiFID II, MiCA, DORA and EMIR,
applies to an affiliate, PM MTF Ltd., not to UpsideOnly itself, which is run by
a Perpetuals subsidiary, USO Labs.
European Source: UpsideOnly
regulators have started folding similar products into old rulebooks, with ESMA
last year ruling that perpetual futures fall
under EU CFD rules,
a sign of how the prop trading world is being pulled into existing oversight.
Contents
- 1 What Happens If the Bets Go Wrong
- 2 Prop Firms and Prediction Markets Are Already Colliding
- 3 A Tokenized Commodities Deal With a Volatile Partner
- 4 The FTX Europe Backdrop
- 5 What Happens If the Bets Go Wrong
- 6 Prop Firms and Prediction Markets Are Already Colliding
- 7 A Tokenized Commodities Deal With a Volatile Partner
- 8 The FTX Europe Backdrop
What Happens If the Bets
Go Wrong
The pitch
rests on a promise that users cannot lose.
“If a
trade loses money, the loss is absorbed by the company rather than the
user,” Alderman commented for FinanceMagnates.com. Users can place a
refundable deposit to lift their payout eligibility, capped at $500 and, he added,
“held separately in U.S. Treasury Bills by an external fiduciary,”
not used for trading.
FinanceMagnates.com
asked how the trading book is funded to back that promise, given Perpetuals’
roughly $20 million market value and its run of losses.
The company
declined to give figures, saying it does “not comment on specific capital
allocation, treasury management, or exposure limits…” beyond public
disclosures, and that it is “well-positioned to deliver on our mission and
to grow.”
Perpetuals
also said the $20 million valuation and the loss history belong to Earlyworks,
the listed shell it absorbed, and “do not reflect the value and financial
forecast of Perpetuals.com Ltd.”
It did not
offer alternative figures for the current business.
Prop Firms and Prediction
Markets Are Already Colliding
UpsideOnly
arrives as the line between prop trading and prediction markets blurs.
In the past
few days, New York startup PropMarket took the prop model into
prediction markets,
and Match-Trade supplied the technology for a
prediction-markets push by prop-firm-backed Trade Tech Solutions.
Others
moved sooner. For Traders launched a prediction-markets prop product in beta,
billed as a first for a prop firm, routing events from Kalshi and other venues
into a challenge format.
Maven
Trading, a CFD-focused prop firm, added its own prediction-markets product,
and Robinhood set an earlier marker with its Prediction
Markets Hub in March 2025.
There is
also news from this week about
the New York startup PropMarket that also is putting the prop trading model
into the prediction markets.
UpsideOnly
does not fit that mold. It runs no event contracts in the Kalshi or Polymarket
style and charges users nothing to take a position.
It treats
their forecasts as fuel for the company’s own book, then shares the upside, a
setup with few parallels among the prop firms remaking themselves
through 2026.
A Tokenized Commodities
Deal With a Volatile Partner
Alongside
the user numbers, Perpetuals said it signed a Mutual Services Agreement with
Datavault AI to list tokenized real-world commodity assets, trading on the
EU-licensed PM MTF venue that runs on Perpetuals technology.
The deal
starts with the MTB Copper project and could widen to gold, copper, geothermal
energy, US critical minerals and European iron and nickel resources, with
combined targeted issuance above $328 million, the company said.
Datavault
AI, also Nasdaq-listed, is a thinly valued partner. Its shares recently traded
around $0.42 for a market value near $476 million, and the stock is down about
70% over six months even after the company reported revenue growth of 1,274%
over the trailing twelve months through the first quarter of 2026.
The push
connects Perpetuals to a theme drawing larger names, with the NYSE turning to tokenization to
extend trading beyond market hours and tokenized stocks jumping thirtyfold
as platforms test 24/7 equity trading.
The FTX Europe Backdrop
The venture
carries history. Gruhn ran FTX Europe, the arm Sam Bankman-Fried’s exchange
bought in 2021 for $323 million, which collapsed alongside the wider group in
2022.
After the
bankruptcy, the FTX estate sued to claw back that money. The dispute ended in
February 2024, when Gruhn and co-founder Robin Matzke bought the European
assets back for $32.7 million with what Alderman called “a full release of
any other known or unknown claims,” leaving no clawback outstanding
against them.
FinanceMagnates.com
earlier reported the estate’s move to recover the $300
million-plus paid to FTX Europe’s leadership.
The
regulated FTX Europe entity later passed to Backpack, after CySEC cleared the rebranded Trek
Labs Europe on
compliance.
What
Perpetuals carried forward is the technology and a trading dataset that
Alderman said spans more than 22 billion retail trades, anonymized and tracing
through FTX to the firm’s earlier Digital Assets DA AG business.
“We do
not disclose proprietary details regarding the composition of the
dataset,” he said.
Perpetuals
reached the Nasdaq by converting Earlyworks, a Japanese-listed shell, into
Perpetuals.com Ltd in February.
Gruhn has
leaned into the early trading mix as proof of changing retail behavior, saying
users who favored gold over Bitcoin are “behaving like macro
traders.”
Whether
that holds, and whether a no-loss prediction game can keep feeding a profitable
trading book, will take more than two weeks of simulated volume to judge.
Perpetuals.com,
the Nasdaq-listed firm run by former FTX Europe boss Patrick Gruhn, says its
new UpsideOnly platform drew more than 30,000 active users and $4.5 billion in
trading volume in its first two weeks. There is a catch worth stating up front:
none of that money was real.
Users do
not trade their own capital. They forecast moves in assets like gold, Bitcoin
and major stocks using virtual money, and the company turns those predictions
into trades with its own funds, keeping half of any profit for users and
covering any losses itself.
In written
responses to questions from FinanceMagnates.com, Perpetuals defended both that
structure and the way it sells the product. “Perpetuals generates revenue
from its own proprietary trading, not from users,” Jason Alderman, the
company’s Chief Communications Officer (CMO), commented.
The product
sits in a fast-growing slice of retail finance where brokers and prop firms use
prediction features to reach younger traders, while prediction markets become a Gen Z
entry point to trading.
In
Perpetuals’ account, gold led at $1.4 billion in paper volume, ahead of Bitcoin
at $1.2 billion, with precious metals near 35% of activity across 186,000 fills
and 25 instruments.
Those are
simulated figures, showing what users chose to bet on rather than where real
money moved.
Perpetuals
sells UpsideOnly as an AI-powered prop trading platform. Its own terms call it
an online prediction analytics game and trading simulation platform.
Asked why
the two descriptions differ, the company said they cover separate parts of the
same operation. “The two descriptions refer to different aspects of the
same model,” said Alderman.
The game
label, Alderman added, reflects the user experience and the platform’s legal
structure, while the prop trading label describes how the company uses player
signals to trade its own money. Users, he continued, do not buy real stocks,
derivatives or any other instruments.
The CMO
said the platform is open to users in the EU and the US, and that it works as a
prediction game rather than a brokerage or managed account.
The
compliance language in the announcement, citing MiFID II, MiCA, DORA and EMIR,
applies to an affiliate, PM MTF Ltd., not to UpsideOnly itself, which is run by
a Perpetuals subsidiary, USO Labs.
European Source: UpsideOnly
regulators have started folding similar products into old rulebooks, with ESMA
last year ruling that perpetual futures fall
under EU CFD rules,
a sign of how the prop trading world is being pulled into existing oversight.
What Happens If the Bets
Go Wrong
The pitch
rests on a promise that users cannot lose.
“If a
trade loses money, the loss is absorbed by the company rather than the
user,” Alderman commented for FinanceMagnates.com. Users can place a
refundable deposit to lift their payout eligibility, capped at $500 and, he added,
“held separately in U.S. Treasury Bills by an external fiduciary,”
not used for trading.
FinanceMagnates.com
asked how the trading book is funded to back that promise, given Perpetuals’
roughly $20 million market value and its run of losses.
The company
declined to give figures, saying it does “not comment on specific capital
allocation, treasury management, or exposure limits…” beyond public
disclosures, and that it is “well-positioned to deliver on our mission and
to grow.”
Perpetuals
also said the $20 million valuation and the loss history belong to Earlyworks,
the listed shell it absorbed, and “do not reflect the value and financial
forecast of Perpetuals.com Ltd.”
It did not
offer alternative figures for the current business.
Prop Firms and Prediction
Markets Are Already Colliding
UpsideOnly
arrives as the line between prop trading and prediction markets blurs.
In the past
few days, New York startup PropMarket took the prop model into
prediction markets,
and Match-Trade supplied the technology for a
prediction-markets push by prop-firm-backed Trade Tech Solutions.
Others
moved sooner. For Traders launched a prediction-markets prop product in beta,
billed as a first for a prop firm, routing events from Kalshi and other venues
into a challenge format.
Maven
Trading, a CFD-focused prop firm, added its own prediction-markets product,
and Robinhood set an earlier marker with its Prediction
Markets Hub in March 2025.
There is
also news from this week about
the New York startup PropMarket that also is putting the prop trading model
into the prediction markets.
UpsideOnly
does not fit that mold. It runs no event contracts in the Kalshi or Polymarket
style and charges users nothing to take a position.
It treats
their forecasts as fuel for the company’s own book, then shares the upside, a
setup with few parallels among the prop firms remaking themselves
through 2026.
A Tokenized Commodities
Deal With a Volatile Partner
Alongside
the user numbers, Perpetuals said it signed a Mutual Services Agreement with
Datavault AI to list tokenized real-world commodity assets, trading on the
EU-licensed PM MTF venue that runs on Perpetuals technology.
The deal
starts with the MTB Copper project and could widen to gold, copper, geothermal
energy, US critical minerals and European iron and nickel resources, with
combined targeted issuance above $328 million, the company said.
Datavault
AI, also Nasdaq-listed, is a thinly valued partner. Its shares recently traded
around $0.42 for a market value near $476 million, and the stock is down about
70% over six months even after the company reported revenue growth of 1,274%
over the trailing twelve months through the first quarter of 2026.
The push
connects Perpetuals to a theme drawing larger names, with the NYSE turning to tokenization to
extend trading beyond market hours and tokenized stocks jumping thirtyfold
as platforms test 24/7 equity trading.
The FTX Europe Backdrop
The venture
carries history. Gruhn ran FTX Europe, the arm Sam Bankman-Fried’s exchange
bought in 2021 for $323 million, which collapsed alongside the wider group in
2022.
After the
bankruptcy, the FTX estate sued to claw back that money. The dispute ended in
February 2024, when Gruhn and co-founder Robin Matzke bought the European
assets back for $32.7 million with what Alderman called “a full release of
any other known or unknown claims,” leaving no clawback outstanding
against them.
FinanceMagnates.com
earlier reported the estate’s move to recover the $300
million-plus paid to FTX Europe’s leadership.
The
regulated FTX Europe entity later passed to Backpack, after CySEC cleared the rebranded Trek
Labs Europe on
compliance.
What
Perpetuals carried forward is the technology and a trading dataset that
Alderman said spans more than 22 billion retail trades, anonymized and tracing
through FTX to the firm’s earlier Digital Assets DA AG business.
“We do
not disclose proprietary details regarding the composition of the
dataset,” he said.
Perpetuals
reached the Nasdaq by converting Earlyworks, a Japanese-listed shell, into
Perpetuals.com Ltd in February.
Gruhn has
leaned into the early trading mix as proof of changing retail behavior, saying
users who favored gold over Bitcoin are “behaving like macro
traders.”
Whether
that holds, and whether a no-loss prediction game can keep feeding a profitable
trading book, will take more than two weeks of simulated volume to judge.
SOURCE LINK : Perpetuals Defends UpsideOnly’s No-Loss Model as Prediction-Market Prop Play Tops $4.5 Billion
