Tracked Prop Firm Crypto Payouts Doubled to $115M in Q1 2026

From $55M to $115M to $115M: Payouts Doubled Then Stalled Over Three Quarters

Top 10 prop firm crypto payouts followed a two-phase trajectory across the three most recently tracked quarters. Aggregate payouts rose 108.2% from Q1 2025 ($55.3 million) to Q4 2025 ($115.2 million), then held flat at $115.1 million in Q1 2026, a 0.1% sequential change. The pattern suggests the rapid expansion of tracked payout activity through 2025 has reached an inflection point. Transaction counts tell a slightly different story: 26,933 in Q1 2025, 57,045 in Q4 2025, and 61,682 in Q1 2026, indicating that while aggregate dollar value stopped growing, the number of distinct payout events continued to rise 8.1% sequentially.

Average payout size across the cohort fell from $2,020 in Q4 2025 to $1,865 in Q1 2026, a 7.7% decline. More payouts, smaller amounts: the cohort is distributing cash to more traders at lower average values. This dynamic could reflect tighter per-trade payout rules at surviving firms, a broader base of newly funded traders reaching first payout thresholds, or shifts in payout rail mix as some traders migrate from crypto to fiat channels for larger amounts.

FundedNext +293%, TopTier Trader -78%: Growth Concentrates in Four Firms as Six Decline

The cohort-level plateau masks substantial within-cohort divergence. Four firms recorded double-digit year-over-year growth in Q1 2026: FundedNext CFDs (+293.2%), MyFunded Futures (+160.6%), The 5%ers (+61.4%), and Alpha Capital Group (+46.8%). FundedNext CFDs alone accounted for $42.7 million of the $115.1 million Q1 2026 total, or 37.1%. Combined with MyFunded Futures ($38.5 million, 33.5%), the two firms represented 70.5% of tracked payouts across the top 10.

Six firms in the cohort recorded year-over-year declines: TopTier Trader (-77.6%), FXIFY (-58.6%), E8 Markets (-11.4%), and Blue Guardian (-14.2%), alongside near-flat results at Instant Funding (+9.8%) and The 5%ers’ modest growth. The concentration of payout growth in the largest two firms, alongside contraction across smaller operators within the same tracked cohort, reproduces the wider industry consolidation pattern reflected in Finance Magnates Intelligence’s estimate of 80 to 100 firm closures between January 2024 and Q1 2026. Of 376 firms tracked in the DealPropFirm database, 84 were no longer active by March 2026.

Table 1. Top 10 prop firms ranked by Q1 2026 year-over-year payout growth.

Firm	Q1 2025 ($M)	Q1 2026 ($M)	YoY Change
FundedNext CFDs	10.85	42.67	+293.2%
MyFunded Futures	14.78	38.51	+160.6%
The 5%ers	8.95	14.44	+61.4%
Alpha Capital Group	5.07	7.44	+46.8%
Instant Funding	2.70	2.97	+9.8%
E8 Markets	5.64	5.00	-11.4%
Blue Guardian	1.60	1.37	-14.2%
FXIFY	3.48	1.44	-58.6%
TopTier Trader	1.61	0.36	-77.6%
Total (9-firm cohort)	54.67	114.20	+108.9%

Note: Aqua Funded appears in Q1 2026 top 10 but not in Q1 2025 top 10, and Funding Traders appears in Q1 2025 top 10 but not Q1 2026; both are excluded from consistent-cohort totals. Source: FM Intelligence calculation based on blockchain data.

Sequential Stall Masks a Shift: FundedNext Fell 25% While MyFunded Futures Rose 39% Q4 to Q1

The flat cohort-level reading from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026 conceals a reshuffling at the top. FundedNext CFDs, the largest firm in Q4 2025 at $56.8 million, fell 24.9% to $42.7 million in Q1 2026, while MyFunded Futures rose 38.6% from $27.8 million to $38.5 million. The 5%ers (+14.7%), Alpha Capital Group (+23.1%), E8 Markets (+12.2%), and FXIFY (+30.4%) all posted sequential gains, indicating Q1 2026 growth was broad-based below the top firm even as FundedNext drew down.

The pattern is consistent with short-term volatility at the largest firm rather than a category-wide reversal. FundedNext CFDs remains 293% above its Q1 2025 level despite the sequential dip, and Aqua Funded (-8.3%) and TopTier Trader (-59.8%) were the only firms to record sequential declines of material size alongside FundedNext.

Five Firms Add Regulated Entities, FTMO Leads with $250 Million OANDA Deal

Five major prop firms or their founders added regulated brokerage entities to their corporate structures between May 2025 and March 2026, with four of the five transactions concentrated in a 16-week window from December 2025 to March 2026. The pattern serves two distinct strategic functions simultaneously. On the regulatory side, holding a recognized brokerage license positions firms ahead of the frameworks signaled by CySEC, ESMA, and the Czech National Bank, and provides operational continuity if MiFID-style rules are formally extended to prop trading. On the commercial side, brokerage operations open revenue streams that the challenge-fee model does not capture: spreads and swaps on retail CFD volume, B-book exposure to retail client losses, and order-flow internalization from existing funded traders who want to deposit personal capital. The relative weight of regulatory versus commercial motivation differs by firm and is rarely disclosed.

On the commercial side, customer demand has been a documented driver. TTT Markets CEO Archie Cade described the origin of his firm’s brokerage launch in a podcast interview in early 2026: “we were getting a lot of messages on WhatsApp and saying, ‘Can we trade live?’ Can we deposit our own funds or take the funds from our funded account and put them into a brokerage with you? And that demand was getting larger and larger and we kept taking notes of who was interested. And that list got quite big. So we were like, let’s build the brokerage arm.”

Cade described the cross-product economics directly: “rather than sending traders elsewhere, if they were happy with our service, happy with our team, our product and they wanted to deposit live, why wouldn’t they be able to deposit live?” He noted that prop-to-broker capital migration is a feature few firms currently offer: “people can take their profits and their withdrawals from their prop accounts and put them into brokerage accounts is quite a cool unique part of what the industry can now offer. We haven’t seen that before.” Topstep launched a similar Introducing Broker pipeline in early 2026.

FTMO closed its acquisition of OANDA Global Corporation from CVC Asia Fund IV on December 1, 2025, after approximately eight months of regulatory approvals across multiple jurisdictions. The deal was financed through a $250 million credit line arranged by UniCredit Bank Czech Republic and Slovakia, according to Czech corporate filings reviewed by Finance Magnates. J.P. Morgan served as financial adviser and Latham & Watkins as legal counsel. CVC had acquired OANDA in 2018 for approximately $162.5 million; the 2025 sale price was not disclosed. On March 27, 2026, FTMO co-founders Otakar Suffner and Marek Vasicek assumed co-CEO roles at OANDA, replacing departing CEO Gavin Bambury, according to OANDA press releases.

TSG Brokers, holding CySEC license 291/16, launched on January 21, 2026, with The5ers founders holding a minority stake via Trade Set Go Holdings Ltd, according to PR Newswire. The Trading Pit registered TTP Markets with the Seychelles Financial Services Authority and launched in March 2026 with a limited rollout to existing prop traders. FNmarkets, the standalone brokerage of FundedNext, launched in May 2025 under a Mwali International Services Authority (Comoros) license, with applications filed with the FSC Mauritius and a Dubai regulator pending as of April 2026. Seacrest, formerly branded as MyFundedFX, shut down its prop trading operations on February 4 to 6, 2026, and now operates exclusively as an FSCA-regulated CFD broker, distributing more than $56 million in final payouts across its 3.5-year operating history.

Table 2. Brokerage build-out tracker, May 2025 to March 2026.

Date	Firm	Brokerage Entity	Regulator / Jurisdiction	Status
May 20, 2025	FundedNext	FNmarkets	MISA Comoros	Live; Mauritius and Dubai pending
Dec 1, 2025	FTMO	OANDA Global Corp.	Multi-jurisdiction (FCA, ASIC, MAS, NFA, etc.)	Closed; $250M UniCredit facility
Jan 21, 2026	The5ers (founders)	TSG Brokers	CySEC license 291/16	Live, EU passporting
Feb 4-6, 2026	Seacrest (ex-MyFundedFX)	Seacrest Markets	FSCA South Africa	Prop shut down; broker-only
Mar 2026	The Trading Pit	TTP Markets	FSA Seychelles	Live, limited rollout

Sources: company press releases

FTMO’s parent company OMHC reported 2024 revenue of approximately $329 million and net profit of $62.5 million, a 53% revenue increase from 2023, according to Finance Magnates reporting from Czech filings. The firm reported 2.3 million open trading accounts in 2024, up 33% year-over-year. The OANDA acquisition adds an established CFD client base, FCA and ASIC licenses, and an existing fiat-payment infrastructure to the FTMO group. No comparable financial disclosures are publicly available for the other firms in the brokerage build-out cohort.

To be sure, holding a brokerage license does not in itself indicate that funded-trader orders are executed in regulated venues. Several prop firms have stated that offshore registrations such as Comoros are obtained primarily for access to MetaQuotes platforms rather than for substantive regulatory compliance, according to TradeInformer reporting. The CySEC and FCA-regulated entities (TSG Brokers and OANDA) carry materially different compliance obligations than the offshore registrations (Comoros, Seychelles).

The Dealing Desk and the C-Book: How Surviving Firms Plan to Monetize Funded-Trader Flow

The brokerage build-out enables a category of revenue that the pure-prop model cannot capture: internalization and selective replication of funded-trader order flow. TTT Markets CEO Archie Cade described the routing logic in a podcast interview in early 2026: “not all firms are routing all of the trades through the market because it wouldn’t make logical sense to do that. That’s why now that we’ve launched the brokerage arm of the business, we have a dealing desk. We have people that are checking the flow, that are checking, you know, traders should be, should they be routed, should they not be routed.”

Cade also described plans for a structured C-book operation built on accumulated trader-performance data: “now that we’ve got a brokerage, we can utilize that data. We can actually do something with it. So now put that onto margin accounts. We can actually, you know, there is even the possibility which we’re looking into, where they call it a C-book, where we’re looking to take the data and to internalize that data and actually make money on the data.” The model resembles long-established practices in retail CFD brokerage: identify consistently profitable clients, mirror or amplify their positions in the firm’s own market exposure, and capture the spread.

Brokeree Solutions marketing manager Anton Sokolov stated to Finance Magnates that internal order processing remains the dominant model across the prop industry. Arizet Labs CEO David Davtyan stated that approximately 90% of prop firms lack the capital to hedge funded accounts, telling Finance Magnates: “Imagine you’re a new prop firm and you sell 1,000 challenges. The average pass rate across the industry is around 13 to 15 percent. Even at 15 percent, that’s 150 funded accounts. The reality is that 90 percent of prop firms don’t have that kind of cash available.” The brokerage build-out provides surviving firms with the infrastructure to monetize selected order flow rather than hedge it.

14% Pass, 7% Payout: The Math Behind the Funded Unicorn Collapse

FPFX Technology data covering 300,000 prop trading accounts across 10 firms shows a 14% challenge pass rate and a 7% payout rate, with average payouts equal to approximately 4% of funded account size. PropFirmMatch tracked $325 million in payouts across the firms it monitors in 2025, a figure that excludes both FTMO and The5ers.

The most documented case of A-book risk materialization is Funded Unicorn, which filed for insolvency in approximately July 2025 after losses described as “high seven-figure” from its policy of mirroring all funded trader positions one-for-one in the market. Founder Thomas Hartmann told users that “all of our funded traders were mirrored 1:1 with real company capital. This procedure was part of our transparent and fair model. But it was precisely this approach that ultimately brought us to our knees.” The firm reported that funded trader behavior changed after evaluation: “challenge accounts that had traded perfectly for weeks disappeared within two days after being switched to funded status.”

Cade addressed the same dynamic from the surviving-firm perspective: “it’s exactly the same as it’s been within the brokerage industry for many many years. This isn’t something that’s new to the prop. Brokerages, often traders hit their margin call and they completely wipe out their account because they’re trading with too big a volume.” His prediction for 2026 ran counter to the discount-war narrative of the prior two years: “pricing is going to go up, rules are going to become a little bit stricter.”

Regulators Signal Without Acting; CFTC’s MyForexFunds Case Dismissed in May 2025

No jurisdiction has enacted bespoke prop firm regulation as of April 2026. The Czech National Bank stated in 2024 that prop trading services “may be subject to the MiFID regulatory framework,” distinguishing demo-account from live-account models. CySEC chairman George Theocharides stated to Finance Magnates that prop firms “will fall under a robust regulatory framework” at some point, while adding in a separate 2025 statement: “I know it’s on the radar, but there’s nothing concrete at the moment in terms of regulatory initiatives from Europe regarding prop trading.” ASIC confirmed plans for surveillance of the industry; outcomes have not been published.

The CFTC’s case against MyForexFunds, filed in 2023 alleging $310 million in fees from 135,000 traders, was dismissed with prejudice in May 2025, after Special Master Jose L. Linares found that the regulator had taken “deliberate steps down a path of obfuscation and avoidance.” The CFTC was ordered to pay the firm’s legal fees, and four CFTC lawyers were placed on administrative leave.