From platform to plumbing
The clearest signal of the shift is cBridge, a standalone liquidity bridge Spotware launched this year that connects brokers to multiple liquidity providers across trading platforms, not only cTrader. The company describes it as capable of cutting broker infrastructure costs by up to 80%.
Iarovitcyn framed the launch as a natural extension rather than a pivot. "The core bridge functionality has existed inside cTrader for years," he said, adding that brokers had long been able to connect liquidity providers directly without an extra fee.
"This is basic functionality, and charging brokers extra for it does not feel fair to us." What changed, he said, was client demand for that connectivity to work across all platforms, "giving them the opportunity to connect different platforms beyond cTrader and manage liquidity across their stack."
He also drew a line between connectivity and the analytics layered on top of it. "Basic liquidity connectivity is now only around 10% of what brokers need," Iarovitcyn said, pointing to risk management, low-latency execution and real-time analysis across aggregated data as the larger demand.
The pricing model is where cBridge is positioned against its competition. Iarovitcyn explained Spotware does not charge based on trading volume, so "the cost structure stays predictable regardless of how the business grows."
That is a direct contrast with MetaQuotes' Ultency, the MT5 native aggregation engine MetaQuotes priced at $1 per $1 million of traded volume, and which has drawn an adoption wave including LMAX, GMG Prime and Vantage.
Finance Magnates has reported on the squeeze that pricing has put on third-party bridge providers such as Gold-i, PrimeXM, oneZero and Centroid, the field Spotware is now entering.
Iarovitcyn said the move was driven by client demand rather than a defensive response to MetaQuotes bundling Ultency into MT5.
The AI-native pitch
The second leg of the repositioning is AI. Spotware opened cTrader to AI agents through two MCP servers, a remote server reachable by a single URL and a local server that reaches the desktop workspace, joining a wave of brokers wiring trading platforms to large language models.
IG Australia, ThinkMarkets and Webull have shipped their own MCP servers, while Interactive Brokers has connected ChatGPT, Grok and Claude with a client-approval gate on every order.
Asked what separated Spotware's release from third-party wrappers and the open-source cTrader MCP tools already on GitHub, Iarovitcyn leaned on platform ownership.
"A wrapper will always be working around the platform from the outside," he said. "As the developer of cTrader, we can go considerably deeper, building the connection into the platform itself, not bridging to it. No external tool can replicate that level of access."
The growth story it will tell, and the parts it won't
Spotware reports more than 11 million traders on cTrader and 105% year-over-year growth in US-dollar trading volume, with its broker and prop-firm client count topping 300 after adding 104 new clients in 2025, according to company figures.
In response to the FM Intelligence questions, Spotware declined to address how the profile of its retail traders has changed, where cTrader sits within the platform market, and how much of its volume growth came from prop firms versus regulated retail brokers, citing confidential data.
Iarovitcyn did describe, however, the broker side of the relationship, saying buyers in 2026 arrive "far more sophisticated" and focused on total cost of ownership rather than platform features alone.
"We are creating an environment without lock-in," he said, citing open API access and the cTrader Leads program, which routes leads from the 11-million-user base to participating brokers.
The undisclosed areas are where independent data is most pointed. FM Intelligence figures put MetaTrader 4 and 5 at the dominant share of the retail CFD market, with MT5 alone accounting for roughly 62% of CFD volumes in the third quarter of 2025 after overtaking MT4 earlier that year.
On the prop-firm question, cTrader was a documented beneficiary of the 80 to 100 prop firms that shut down in 2024: after MetaQuotes' crackdown on the sector, firms including FTMO and Instant Funding, FundingRock and Hola Prime adopted cTrader.
What 2030 looks like
Asked where retail trading lands by 2030, Iarovitcyn returned to AI.
"Retail trading in 2030 will look significantly more AI-native than it does today," he said, describing a platform as "an environment where AI agents can operate across a much wider set of actions" through evolving MCP servers. "More actions will be delegated to agents, and the platform has to support that natively."
That outlook arrives as regulators continue to tighten the retail screws Iarovitcyn was asked about.
In Europe, ESMA has stopped renewing its temporary CFD intervention measures, leaving leverage caps to national regulators, and recently ruled that perpetual futures fall under EU CFD rules. In Australia, ASIC went further than ESMA on leverage.
For a vendor whose income depends on broker trading activity, those constraints frame the bet Spotware is making, that the next decade of retail trading is built less around the chart window and more around the infrastructure, and the agents, behind it.