The 2024 to 2026 Industry Shakeout

The shakeout began with an email, not a regulator. In mid-February 2024 MetaQuotes, the company behind MetaTrader 4 and 5, forced its white-label and grey-label brokers to cut off prop firms that had active US accounts ^[1]. Within four months, three evaluation firms had paused or closed. Within a year, the trade press counted 80 to 100 closures. By 2026 the largest survivors owned brokers. This is the verified timeline, in the firms' own words or the primary reporting, with nothing added.

The trigger: February 2024

Around 13 to 15 February 2024, MetaQuotes forced white-label and grey-label brokers, BlackBull and Purple Trading among them, to cut off prop firms with active US accounts. A leaked email cited the need for FINRA or NFA regulation for US access. MetaQuotes made no public statement ^[1]. Funding Pips, served through BlackBull, was affected first. Funded Engineer, AquaFunded, Goat Funded Trader, The Funded Trader and others followed through Purple Trading, and True Forex Funds, FundedNext, The5ers and FTMO were affected too. Firms responded by cutting US clients or integrating new platforms, and Finance Magnates reported both responses within the week ^[2].

The first closures: March to May 2024

The Funded Trader paused all operations on 28 March 2024. Finance Magnates reported just over $2 million in blocked withdrawals in January and February 2024 against $17 million paid ^[3]. In August 2024 the firm said it had paid 30 percent of the payouts it owed ^[4]. True Forex Funds announced its closure on 13 May 2024 after losing MetaTrader access in February. Primary reporting does not establish what it owed, so we quote no figure ^[5]. SurgeTrader ceased operations on 24 May 2024, one week after Match-Trade terminated its licence on 17 May ^[6]. Three firms, three months, and the same dependency at the centre of each: a platform licence the firm did not control.

The count

Finance Magnates Intelligence put the 2024 closures at 80 to 100 firms in a report on 27 February 2025 ^[7]. The same report cited FPFX data across about 300,000 accounts that still showed MT5 at 61.9 percent, so the platform lost firms without losing its share of accounts. Match-Trade Technologies, one of the vendors that gained, reported server clients up 290 percent since January 2024 without disclosing absolute numbers ^[8]. No authoritative count of firms in the industry exists, before or after 2024, so the 80 to 100 figure is a trade-press estimate and we present it as one.

Self-regulation

The Prop Association launched on 7 January 2025 as a self-regulatory industry body ^[9]. No regulator in the US, UK or EU had issued a determination on evaluation firms by then, and none has since. The association is the industry's own answer to that absence.

Consolidation and integration

The survivors spent 2025 and 2026 buying or building the dependencies that had failed the firms around them. FTMO announced the purchase of OANDA from CVC on 3 February 2025 and closed it on 1 December 2025, running OANDA as a standalone business ^[10]. The price was undisclosed at closing. FTMO's 2025 filings later showed CZK 8.79 billion, about $422 million, and its parent OHM reported 2025 consolidated revenue of CZK 8.9 billion, up 30 percent ^[11]. Kraken completed its acquisition of Breakout on 4 September 2025 at an undisclosed price ^[12]. Topstep opened a waitlist for Topstep Brokerage, a CFTC-registered introducing broker and NFA member clearing through Plus500, on 27 January 2026 ^[13], then obtained CTA approval in April 2026 and registered as a swap firm with the NFA on 2 May 2026 ^[14]. Tradeify Brokerage LLC, trading as Slay Markets, launched on 19 May 2026 with NinjaTrader clearing ^[15]. 2 prop firms therefore launched CFTC-registered introducing brokers in 2026. Neither the CFTC nor the NFA has stated a position on evaluation products, and the CFTC's 2026 regulatory agenda omits them ^[19]. Topstep's registrations were voluntary.

The 2026 exits

Closures did not stop with the platform crisis. FundingTicks announced a wind-down on 18 January 2026, with refunds underway and support running until 31 January 2026 ^[16]. Seacrest Markets, which had absorbed MyFundedFX and rebranded it SeacrestFunded, closed all prop CFD accounts on 6 February 2026 with a refund and payout deadline of 28 February 2026. MyFunded Futures is a separate business and continues ^[17]. Both exits came with a notice, a refund process and a deadline measured in weeks, which is the pattern our due diligence checklist tells you to plan for.

Product resets

The firms that stayed reworked their products. Apex split its legacy and new products effective 1 March 2026 under the "4.0" label, with end-of-day and intraday drawdown variants, announced on its news page between 16 and 19 March 2026 ^[18]. Apex states no evaluation consistency rule on its current product, where its legacy product had a 50 percent rule, and it removed its 5:1 risk-reward rule. Our public changelog records 47 verified changes between 20 July and 6 September 2026 as of 13 September 2026, 36 of them dated 6 September. On that day MyFundedFutures ended subscriptions for one-time plans, Bulenox dropped monthly billing for a one-time fee with 30-day access, and DNA Funded moved to a single one-time fee per size. 152 of 159 programme rows in our dataset now bill a one-time fee. Of the 47 changes, 6 were better for the trader, 4 worse and 37 neutral.

Our view

Our view: the shakeout was a dependency failure, not a demand failure. Firms did not close because traders stopped buying evaluations. They closed because a platform vendor, a technology licensor or a payout obligation they did not control moved against them inside a few weeks. The survivors have reduced that exposure in two ways, by owning the pipe (FTMO with OANDA, Breakout inside Kraken, Topstep and Tradeify with their own introducing brokers) and by registering with a supervisor before being told to. Neither step makes an evaluation product regulated, and neither guarantees a payout. What they do is put a second income line and a named regulator behind at least part of the business. The firms most exposed to the next shock are the ones with one platform, one broker and no supervisor, and the 2026 exits show the shock does not need a MetaQuotes email to arrive.

What this means for you

Read every firm through its dependencies: which platform, which broker, which payment rail, and who licenses each of them. The 2024 closures ran through those links, not through the rules page.

Expect a wind-down to give you weeks, not months. FundingTicks kept support open for 13 days after its announcement and Seacrest set a deadline 22 days after closing accounts. Keep your records current so you can act inside that window.

Treat a broker parent or an NFA registration as a disclosure that lowers one risk. It does not change the rules of the evaluation you are buying, and those rules still decide whether you get paid.

Data note

Figures marked "our dataset" come from the PropTraderCheck structured dataset as of 13 September 2026: 30 firms with structured programme data (of 37 tracked), 159 programme rows, 48 programmes. Regulatory positions are stated as of the date given and change.