The 2024 to 2026 Industry Shakeout

How One Third of the Industry Disappeared

The crisis began on 2 February 2024, when MetaQuotes, the company behind MetaTrader 4 and MetaTrader 5, terminated platform licences for prop firms serving United States based clients or operating without formal broker partnerships. The decision was sudden, unannounced and immediately devastating. Firms that had built their entire trading infrastructure around MetaTrader were cut off from the platforms their traders relied upon.

True Forex Funds was among the first casualties, shutting down on 13 May 2024 with approximately ".2 million owed to 300 funded traders. SurgeTrader followed on 24 May 2024, later blacklisted for platform manipulation and money laundering. The Funded Trader paused operations on 28 March 2024 and subsequently acknowledged more than $2 million in denied payouts. Throughout 2024, smaller firms collapsed at a pace of roughly two to three per month, many simply ceasing to respond to trader inquiries without formal announcement.

The underlying vulnerability was not platform dependence alone. Many firms had constructed business models that relied almost exclusively on evaluation fee revenue. Profitable traders were a small minority whose payouts could be funded from the constant inflow of new challenge purchases. When MetaQuotes disrupted the platform layer and payment processors simultaneously tightened their onboarding standards, the cash flow equation broke. Firms without capital reserves could not honour their payout obligations.

The shakeout continued through 2025. FundingTicks wound down in January 2026 following a period of declining Trustpilot ratings and trust erosion. MyFundedFX (later rebranded SeacrestFunded) ceased operations in February 2026 with funded traders reporting unpaid withdrawals.

The survivors invested in resilience. FTMO diversified its platform risk by completing its acquisition of OANDA in December 2025, in a deal estimated at "80 to $220 million. Match Trader absorbed displaced volume and saw a 290 percent increase in server clients. The Prop Association was established in April 2025 to create industry transparency standards. Apex Trader Funding's March 2026 product overhaul represented a direct response to the structural criticisms that had dogged the firm for years.

By March 2026, the industry had lost roughly one third of its active participants but had gained something arguably more valuable: a clearer distinction between firms built for longevity and firms built for short term fee extraction.