Perpetuals.com, founded by former FTX EU trading specialists Patrick Gruhn and Robin Matzke, as an AI-driven derivatives platform aimed at regulated institutional and retail markets. The company completed a rebrand and listing under Nasdaq ticker PDC and closed a $35 million Series A round led by investors including ARK Invest and Coinbase Ventures,.
The platform combines a proprietary machine-learning stack trained on more than 10 million anonymized retail trading histories with Kronos X, a blockchain-native exchange and settlement suite, to offer perpetual contracts across stocks, FX and commodities—a model the founders position as a regulated alternative to CFD and unregulated perpetual venues.
Perpetuals.com raised $35 million in Series A financing and has discussed further equity raises at an indicative valuation near €250 million, according to the company statement. The offering includes 24/7 perpetual contracts without settlement dates, tokenized structured products and options, designed to reduce execution friction for institutional desks and provide regulated access for EU and cross-border clients.
The initiative repurposes assets and talent from the former FTX EU operation. The firm says it is targeting institutional demand by operating a dual-regulated structure: a Bermuda entity under the Bermuda Monetary Authority and a European arm licensed under CySEC and compliant with MiFID II. That regulatory architecture, the company argues, is intended to provide consistent compliance across jurisdictions while enabling product distribution in regulated markets.
Technology, risk and market impact
At the core is a machine-learning engine trained on a dataset of over 10 million retail trade histories, which the company claims allows the models to estimate trader-level win/loss probabilities and detect nuanced market signals. Those models feed automated processes for margin management, liquidation and funding-rate adjustments, executed via smart contracts.
Perpetuals.com integrates Kronos X® to provide blockchain-based settlement and self-clearing capabilities, which the firm says are compliant with European rules including MiFID II, MiCA, DORA and EMIR. The integration is presented as a way to improve transparency in funding and execution while lowering operational overhead for market makers and structured-product issuers.
The derivatives market remains vast: the Bank for International Settlements valued notional amounts outstanding at $846 trillion as of jun. de 2025, a scale that explains Perpetuals.com’s ambition to capture institutional flow. For users, the platform’s AI-driven risk tools could tighten hedging and execution for market makers, but they also increase reliance on model integrity—where errors or biases can amplify losses under leverage.
Investors and market participants are now turning their attention to Perpetuals.com’s roadmap, which includes launching its own European Multilateral Trading Facilities during 2026; that rollout will serve as a practical test of the firm’s regulatory-compliance claims and of whether AI-driven execution can measurably improve liquidity and risk management in regulated perpetual markets.
