What if you could make trades on the global financial markets and never lose money? That’s the pitch of UpsideOnly, a new AI-powered trading platform from Perpetuals.com. While the idea is obviously compelling, there is a big catch. UpsideOnly exists as a kind of fake trading platform where human users trade stocks, cryptocurrencies, and commodities. The idea is that by engaging in these fake trades, humans are providing data to the company’s AI model, BayesShield AI, which then adds that information to what it already has by observing markets and its training data of historical trades. Aaron Rudder, the company’s chief product officer, told Gizmodo that the combination of signals from human users and AI provides valuable insight. The catch is that none of the trades made by humans will actually happen, at least not immediately. The AI decides what to actually trade using real money. If the AI loses money based on input from the humans, those humans don’t lose any real money since it was all a simulation for humans to begin with. But if the AI makes real money, a small part of that profit is shared with the humans who wanted that trade to happen.
Rudder previously served as Head of Crypto Research at the European office of FTX before the company imploded in 2022 thanks to Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud. He told Gizmodo that at its core, UpsideOnly is about making sure users never risk real capital but get rewarded for insights. How much reward? That depends on how much users deposit in a refundable account kept in U.S. Treasury bills, according to Rudder.
