Mario Naufal’s viral interview names Patrick Groen as one of the few FTX insiders who not only survived, but also profited materially from the wreckage.
FTX Europe’s former CEO Patrick Gruhn, who sold the business to the Sam Bankman Fried empire for about $400 million and then bought it back after it collapsed for about $30 million, is now touting a “no-lose” AI trading platform called UpsideOnly that uses only corporate capital to place trades based on user predictions.
A U.S. court filing later described the deal as part of an approximately $376 million spend to secure a European license.
After the exchange’s collapse, the FTX Foundation sued to recover hundreds of millions of dollars, but ultimately agreed to sell FTX Europe’s assets to Gruhn and co-founder Robin Matzke for $32.7 million in a February 2024 settlement reported by The Wall Street Journal and others.
How did Patrick Gruhn turn the $400 million FTX story into a “risk-free” pitch for UpsideOnly?
In an interview, Mr. Naufal summed up the story with tabloid clarity, saying that Mr. Gruhn “sold his company to FTX for $400 million before it went bankrupt, watched it collapse, then bought it back for $30 million,” before turning to promoting UpsideOnly as “the most interesting idea in trading today.”
Gruhn previously outlined FTX Europe’s ambitions to dominate derivatives and capture retail traders across the bloc in his Insider Profile, but he is now relying on that history to argue that the problem is not leverage or innovation, but how the platform has weaponized both against its own customers.
Mr. Naufal said Mr. Groen’s views were unforgiving toward his former partner. “FTX would probably be bigger than Binance today if Sam Bankman Freed hadn’t run it down,” and what happened “wasn’t an outright fraud from day one, it was embezzlement, and it’s the same thing a bank would legally do, except FTX is not a bank.”
What is UpsideOnly and do “no-lose” trades actually work?
UpsideOnly is built under the Nasdaq-listed Perpetuals.com umbrella and is described in an interview as a trading and market prediction platform that “trades with their money, loses nothing if they’re wrong, and splits the profits 50-50 if they’re right.”
Interview: Patrick Groen was CEO of FTX Europe. He sold the company to FTX for $400 million before it went bankrupt, watched it collapse, and then bought it back for $30 million.
He has built what may be the most interesting idea in trading right now.
His company… pic.twitter.com/3swlvUSJ91
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) May 21, 2026
According to a recent launch release, Perpetuals trained its proprietary BayesShield AI engine on “over 22 billion retail trades” and combined that dataset with crowd signals from users who make directional calls across stocks, cryptocurrencies, commodities, and foreign exchange without investing their own capital.
According to Perpetuals, “UpsideOnly is a first-of-its-kind, risk-free platform that leverages proprietary AI trained on over 22 billion retail trades to predict the market, ensuring users never lose money, only win.” That’s because “users never commit their own funds to trade” and “Perpetuals trades only with its own capital.”
If the trade wins, Perpetuals will share the profit with the user whose prediction contributed to the decision, but if it loses, “the user loses nothing.” This structure stands in contrast to traditional derivatives exchanges, which Gruhn says sell “desperate people the dream of escaping financial pressure overnight” and then leave them “structurally doomed to market makers and professional liquidity providers.”
Naufal’s interview points out that Upside Only’s argument is based on a clear division of labor between humans and machines, with Gruhn claiming that “humans are actually much better at identifying entry points than exit points, and that’s where AI takes over,” and that most traders “secure small wins, but refuse to accept losses until they are wiped out.”
The clip also veers into outright indictments of leveraged casinos, with a time-stamped warning on a segment about “suicide, addiction, and financial ruin caused by predatory trading platforms and influencers,” and a claim that “casinos actually give people much better odds than crypto leveraged trading platforms,” a comparison that echoes previous crypto market outlook coverage of systemic retail losses.
Perpetuals’ own disclaimer says it all. If a “never lose” platform is openly concerned about its regulatory treatment, model risk, and capital sustainability, the more realistic base case is not that it has resolved market sentiment, but that it is rehypothesizing it in a new wrapper.
Regardless of how the BayesShield engine is configured, taking on retail errors at scale in pursuit of edges extracted from the same pathologies that caused users to blow up on FTX and Binance looks more like a sophisticated principal book waiting for a bad regime shift, liquidity crunch, or model mistake to reveal where the losses really are than solving a consumer problem.
In that sense, UpsideOnly is not so much about abolishing the house as it is about moving it off the screen and asking traders to trust the balance sheet, the AI stack, and the risk committee. When a fat tail event first arrives and a company has to decide whether to continue eating losses or quietly rewrite the rules, it will almost certainly not feel “risk-free.”
