By PYMNTS | May 19, 2026
Perpetuals.com Ltd. has launched an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered trading platform that allows users to submit trading strategies without risking their own money. This marks a new attempt to combine crowdsourced investing with algorithmic execution, Bloomberg reported Tuesday (May 19).
The platform, called UpsideOnly, lets users place simulated trades predicting the future prices of assets including equities, gold and oil. Perpetuals then uses an internal AI model to evaluate those signals, identify strategies most likely to succeed and execute trades using the company’s own capital. Profits are split with users whose strategies generated winning signals.
The launch reflects a shift across financial services as firms search for practical ways to apply AI to trading, forecasting and financial decision-making. Instead of replacing traders entirely, Perpetuals is positioning AI as a filtering and execution layer designed to identify high-performing human-generated market signals.
Patrick Gruhn, chief executive officer of Perpetuals and former head of FTX Europe, said the model is built around the idea that retail traders often identify strong opportunities but struggle with execution and risk management.
“That’s the entire idea in using human intelligence, crowd intelligence,” Gruhn told Bloomberg.
Perpetuals said its in-house model, BayesShield AI, has been trained on 22 billion trades and is specifically designed to rank trading strategies rather than predict markets directly.
The company’s approach comes as financial institutions increasingly experiment with hybrid human-AI operating models. While AI tools have spread rapidly across Wall Street workflows, fully autonomous trading systems have struggled to consistently outperform markets, particularly in crypto trading environments.
The platform’s structure also reflects ongoing trust concerns following the collapse of crypto exchange FTX in 2022. Gruhn said his experience at the failed exchange influenced the decision not to custody user assets or require users to commit capital.
Perpetuals said it is currently in talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to expand trading activity. Gruhn has also committed $100 million of his own capital to support the platform’s proprietary trading operations.
PYMNTS reported that the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is deploying AI systems to detect suspicious trading behavior and insider activity across prediction markets, underscoring how both trading firms and regulators are rapidly adopting AI to influence and oversee market activity.