coindesk.com
A group of digital asset trading and tokenization pioneers unveiled Perpetuals.com (PDC), a derivatives platform specializing in machine learning and AI, whose shares start trading on Nasdaq later Tuesday.
The company, whose leaders were co-founders of what became crypto exchange FTX's European Union operation, offers regulated 24/7 self-clearing and blockchain-based settlement technology, according to a press release. The entity was announced following the acquisition of Perpetual Markets Ltd. by Earlyworks Co.
Perpetual’s Patrick Gruhn and Robin Matzke, were co-founders of a Zurich, Switzerland-based firm called Digital Assets, which was acquired by FTX’s Sam Bankman Fried in 2021, and rebranded as FTX EU.
After a lengthy legal process, the pair were able to buy back the remaining assets of FTX EU following the parent's bankruptcy and begin working in stealth on the Perpetuals platform, which begins public trading this week.
The determination to claw back what remained of FTX EU was critical in creating Perpetuals, Gruhn said, because it provided an extremely large dataset of retail trading activity to train the firm’s AI and machine learning capabilities on.
“Prior to the new business combination, Perpetuals developed an AI system that was trained using one of the largest datasets of retail trading behavior ever assembled, analyzing over 10 million individual trading histories across multiple major cryptocurrency exchanges,” Gruhn said in an interview.
The aim, Gruhn said, is to help product issuers create innovative alternatives to the strictly regulated and often predatory Contract for Differences (CFD) and perpetual futures markets.
Perpetuals aims to disrupt these markets with its AI-enhanced products, he said, and ultimately protect retail users from losses in historically unfair and unethical trading environments.
“The model identifies patterns in collective market sentiment to calculate win/loss probability of single traders. It can be used by financial market participants such as issuers of products like option writer or market maker to optimize hedging strategies,” Gruhn said.