Mario Naufal’s viral interview names Patrick Groen as one of many few FTX insiders who not solely survived, but in addition profited materially from the wreckage.
FTX Europe’s former CEO Patrick Gruhn, who offered the enterprise to the Sam Bankman Fried empire for about $400 million after which purchased it again after it collapsed for about $30 million, is now touting a “no-lose” AI buying and selling platform referred to as UpsideOnly that makes use of solely company capital to position trades based mostly on person predictions.
A U.S. court docket submitting later described the deal as a part of an roughly $376 million spend to safe a European license.
After the change’s collapse, the FTX Basis sued to get well a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}, however finally agreed to promote FTX Europe’s property to Gruhn and co-founder Robin Matzke for $32.7 million in a February 2024 settlement reported by The Wall Road Journal and others.
How did Patrick Gruhn flip the $400 million FTX story right into a “risk-free” pitch for UpsideOnly?
In an interview, Mr. Naufal summed up the story with tabloid readability, saying that Mr. Gruhn “offered his firm to FTX for $400 million earlier than it went bankrupt, watched it collapse, then purchased it again for $30 million,” earlier than turning to selling UpsideOnly as “probably the most attention-grabbing concept in buying and selling right this moment.”
Gruhn beforehand outlined FTX Europe’s ambitions to dominate derivatives and seize retail merchants throughout the bloc in his Insider Profile, however he’s now counting on that historical past to argue that the issue shouldn’t be leverage or innovation, however how the platform has weaponized each towards its personal clients.
Mr. Naufal mentioned Mr. Groen’s views have been unforgiving towards his former associate. “FTX would most likely be greater than Binance right this moment if Sam Bankman Freed hadn’t run it down,” and what occurred “wasn’t an outright fraud from day one, it was embezzlement, and it is the identical factor a financial institution would legally do, besides FTX shouldn’t be a financial institution.”
What’s UpsideOnly and do “no-lose” trades truly work?
UpsideOnly is constructed underneath the Nasdaq-listed Perpetuals.com umbrella and is described in an interview as a buying and selling and market prediction platform that “trades with their cash, loses nothing in the event that they’re mistaken, and splits the earnings 50-50 in the event that they’re proper.”
Interview: Patrick Groen was CEO of FTX Europe. He offered the corporate to FTX for $400 million earlier than it went bankrupt, watched it collapse, after which purchased it again for $30 million.
He has constructed what often is the most attention-grabbing concept in buying and selling proper now.
His firm… pic.twitter.com/3swlvUSJ91
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) Might 21, 2026
In keeping with a current launch launch, Perpetuals skilled its proprietary BayesShield AI engine on “over 22 billion retail trades” and mixed that dataset with crowd indicators from customers who make directional calls throughout shares, cryptocurrencies, commodities, and overseas change with out investing their very own capital.
In keeping with Perpetuals, “UpsideOnly is a first-of-its-kind, risk-free platform that leverages proprietary AI skilled on over 22 billion retail trades to foretell the market, guaranteeing customers by no means lose cash, solely win.” That is as a result of “customers by no means commit their very own funds to commerce” and “Perpetuals trades solely with its personal capital.”
If the commerce wins, Perpetuals will share the revenue with the person whose prediction contributed to the choice, but when it loses, “the person loses nothing.” This construction stands in distinction to conventional derivatives exchanges, which Gruhn says promote “determined folks the dream of escaping monetary stress in a single day” after which go away them “structurally doomed to market makers {and professional} liquidity suppliers.”
Naufal’s interview factors out that Upside Solely’s argument is predicated on a transparent division of labor between people and machines, with Gruhn claiming that “people are literally a lot better at figuring out entry factors than exit factors, and that is the place AI takes over,” and that almost all merchants “safe small wins, however refuse to just accept losses till they’re worn out.”
The clip additionally veers into outright indictments of leveraged casinos, with a time-stamped warning on a phase about “suicide, habit, and monetary spoil brought on by predatory buying and selling platforms and influencers,” and a declare that “casinos truly give folks a lot better odds than crypto leveraged buying and selling platforms,” a comparability that echoes earlier crypto market outlook protection of systemic retail losses.
Perpetuals’ personal disclaimer says all of it. If a “by no means lose” platform is brazenly involved about its regulatory therapy, mannequin danger, and capital sustainability, the extra lifelike base case shouldn’t be that it has resolved market sentiment, however that it’s rehypothesizing it in a brand new wrapper.
No matter how the BayesShield engine is configured, taking up retail errors at scale in pursuit of edges extracted from the identical pathologies that induced customers to explode on FTX and Binance appears to be like extra like a classy principal e-book ready for a nasty regime shift, a liquidity crunch, or a mannequin mistake to disclose the place the losses actually are than fixing a shopper drawback.
In that sense, UpsideOnly shouldn’t be a lot about abolishing the home as it’s about transferring it off the display and asking merchants to belief the stability sheet, the AI stack, and the danger committee. When a fats tail occasion first arrives and an organization has to determine whether or not to proceed consuming losses or quietly rewrite the principles, it is going to nearly actually not really feel “risk-free.”
