Perpetuals.com Ltd. has launched UpsideOnly, a trading and market prediction platform that lets users make market calls without staking their own trading capital.
The Nasdaq-listed company said the platform allows users to submit predictions across equities, crypto, commodities and foreign exchange. Perpetuals then uses its own capital to trade selected signals and shares profits with users when those trades are successful.
The company says users do not lose money if a prediction is wrong, if no trade is placed, or if a company-funded trade loses.
That makes UpsideOnly closer to a hybrid between a prediction platform, signal marketplace and proprietary trading model than a traditional retail brokerage.
AI meets crowd-sourced market signals
UpsideOnly is powered by Perpetuals’ patent-pending BayesShield AI.
According to the company, BayesShield has been trained on more than 22 billion executed retail trades and is designed to combine user predictions with large-scale behavioral trading data. The system then identifies which predictions may be strong enough for Perpetuals to trade using its own capital.
The company has not disclosed the full methodology behind BayesShield, its historical performance, or the risk controls used when executing trades.
That important because the central claim of UpsideOnly is not only that users avoid downside risk, but that Perpetuals can turn user insight and AI filtering into profitable trades at scale.
Why does it matter? Retail trading remains a difficult market for ordinary users.
A CFA Institute analysis citing SEBI data said more than nine out of ten retail investors in India lost money trading futures and options in FY25. The same analysis cited loss rates of about 60% for US retail futures traders and 70% to 80% for UK retail CFD clients.
Perpetuals is positioning UpsideOnly as a response to that structure.
“The dominant retail trading model is not a tool. It is a trap, designed so the platform wins when you lose. I spent more than a decade inside this industry and watched the same thing happen over and over. Platforms engineered to extract money from the people who could least afford to lose it, sold to them as investing,” said Patrick Gruhn, CEO of Perpetuals.
“UpsideOnly completely changes this broken structure. The user brings the insight, we bring the capital, and we win together. This is what the next generation of financial platforms looks like: humans and AI teaming up on the same side of the table.”
The model also arrives as prediction markets are gaining mainstream attention.
Kalshi and Polymarket have seen trading volumes surge, while regulators and lawmakers are paying closer attention to suspicious trading, insider-information risks and the blurred line between financial forecasting and betting. Reuters reported that Kalshi had flagged more than 400 suspicious trades since the start of 2026, more than double the number investigated in all of 2025.
A different model from prediction markets
Traditional prediction markets usually require users to put capital at risk.
Users buy contracts tied to outcomes, such as elections, economic data, sports, policy decisions or corporate events. If they are wrong, they can lose their stake.
UpsideOnly changes that economic relationship.
Users make predictions, but Perpetuals decides whether to trade them. The platform’s promise is that the user’s prediction becomes an input to the company’s trading system, not a direct user-funded bet.
That could reduce direct financial harm for users.
It also shifts the main risk to Perpetuals, which must decide whether its AI model can identify profitable signals often enough to cover payouts, operating costs and trading losses.
Refundable deposits and bot controls
Perpetuals said no deposit is required to make predictions and win money on UpsideOnly.
However, users who provide a refundable deposit of $1 or more may receive higher payouts. The company said this is intended to reduce bot activity and encourage more considered predictions.
Perpetuals said the deposit is not used for trading. It is held in US Treasury bills in an external account by a separate US-based fiduciary and can be withdrawn by users at any time, according to the announcement.
Perpetuals’ public-market background
Perpetuals.com trades on Nasdaq under the ticker PDC.
The company emerged after Earlyworks completed its acquisition of Perpetual Markets Ltd. and rebranded as Perpetuals.com Ltd., with the PDC ticker becoming effective on Jan. 20, 2026. Its core business includes software that connects traditional financial markets with blockchain-based crypto markets.
Perpetuals is a regulated financial market infrastructure provider, including capital markets software, custody services and consumer trading and prediction-market platforms.
Gruhn was appointed co-chief executive officer and representative director in January 2026, according to a company filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing said he had served as CEO and president of Kephas Corporation, doing business as Perpetuals.com, since 2016.
Gruhn is also linked to FTX Europe’s earlier history.
Reuters reported in 2024 that bankrupt crypto exchange FTX settled litigation over its European expansion by agreeing to sell FTX Europe back to its original founders, including Gruhn and Robin Matzke, for $32.7 million. The founders denied FTX’s allegations in that dispute.
Similar efforts and the broader trend
UpsideOnly enters a market where financial platforms are increasingly experimenting with crowd intelligence, event contracts and AI-assisted trading tools.
Kalshi and Polymarket have helped turn prediction markets into a major retail and institutional trend. Kalshi’s annualized trading volume had more than tripled over six months to $178 billion, while Polymarket’s monthly notional volume reached about $10.3 billion in April 2026.
The difference is that those platforms generally allow users to trade contracts directly.
UpsideOnly’s pitch is that users contribute information while the company carries the trading risk.
That distinction could help Perpetuals stand out, but it also raises questions about scalability, payout sustainability, regulatory classification and transparency around AI-driven trading decisions.
Overall, the launch reflects a broader shift in retail finance: platforms are no longer competing only on access to markets. They are competing on how much risk the user is asked to carry
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Read our Editorial Policy. Parts of this article were drafted/ researched with the assistance of AI tools and subsequently reviewed, edited, and verified by the author and our editorial team to ensure accuracy and journalistic integrity. The final version reflects human editorial judgment and fact-checking. Read our AI Policy.
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