UpsideOnly, the AI-driven proprietary trading platform operated by USO Labs Ltd. as a subsidiary of NASDAQ-listed Perpetuals.com Ltd. (NASDAQ: PDC), reported first-week operational data that points to an unexpected verdict from a young retail trading cohort: gold, not Bitcoin, is the asset they most want to trade.
In the seven days since its May 19, 2026 launch, UpsideOnly recorded:
- 24,568 active users from a pre-registration pool of more than 80,000
- $2.38 billion in cumulative paper trading volume
- 101,511 fills across 26 distinct instruments
- $757.2 million of prediction volume in XAU/USD, the platform’s most-traded asset
- $709.5 million in BTC/USD, placing Bitcoin a close second
- Precious metals (XAU + XAG) accounting for 36.7% of total platform volume
Retail trading platforms have, since 2020, been associated almost reflexively with crypto and US single-name equities. UpsideOnly’s week-one mix tells a different story. Gold leads, Silver ranks fourth, ahead of Ethereum. The combined precious-metals complex outweighs the combined major crypto pairs (BTC, SOL, ETH, BNB, XRP) by more than $20 million.
The result is consistent with a macro environment in which central bank gold buying, fiscal trajectories in the major reserve currencies, and persistent geopolitical risk premia have driven institutional capital into bullion. UpsideOnly’s data suggests retail conviction is now tracking that institutional posture and doing so on a platform where users are free to express that conviction across equities, FX, commodities, and crypto in a single account.
Comment from the CEO
“When you give a self-selecting cohort of 24,000 traders access to gold, silver, oil, the Mag 7, the major FX pairs, and the largest crypto by market cap, and gold finishes first, that is a signal,” said Patrick Gruhn, CEO of Perpetuals.com Ltd. “Bitcoin is right behind it, and we expect the leadership to rotate week to week. But the broader picture from our first week is that retail traders, given a wider menu, are not behaving like a crypto-only or equities-only cohort. They are behaving like macro traders. That is a meaningful data point for how the next generation of retail engages with markets.”
The full week-one asset breakdown
Beyond the headline matchup, the first-week tape shows broad participation:
- Crypto majors: BTC/USD $709M, SOL/USD $377M, ETH/USD $79M, BNB/USD $34M, XRP/USD $19.5M
- US equities: NVDA $35.4M, TSLA $34.2M, AMZN $8.6M, AAPL $7.6M, META $4.6M
- FX: EUR/USD $40M, GBP/USD $21.3M, AUD/USD $19.6M, USD/JPY $12.7M, USD/CHF $9.0M
- Commodities: Crude $23.4M (CL) + $8.1M (WTI), Natural Gas $17.4M, Copper $8.2M
- ETFs: QQQ $19.6M, SPY $9.9M, DIA $2.8M, EWJ $0.96M, EWU $0.42M
Average prediction volume per active user came in at approximately $96,700 for the week, with an average fill size of roughly $23,400.