PropFirmTrusted

· PropFirmTrusted Team

The State of Prop Trading in 2026: Every Change That Actually Matters

FTMO bought a broker, Topstep cut its split, Apex rebuilt itself, and Trustpilot started suppressing fake-review firms. A factual recap of eighteen months that reshaped funded trading.

The prop industry changes faster than its marketing pages. Here is the verified timeline of what actually happened in 2025–2026, and what each change means if you're buying a challenge today.

The consolidation era began

FTMO completed its acquisition of OANDA on December 1, 2025 — a retail broker with regulatory licences across five jurisdictions, bought by a prop firm. Beyond the headline, the deal solved FTMO's biggest problem: US traders, cut off during the 2025 MetaTrader crackdown, came back through the OANDA partnership. As of mid-2026, FTMO is the only major forex prop firm offering MT5 to US residents (our FTMO review).

Topstep acquired The Futures Desk in April 2026 and is folding its technology into TopstepX — the proprietary platform that is now mandatory for new Trading Combine sign-ups.

The deals got thinner at the top…

Topstep's January 2026 change is the cleanest example: the famous "keep 100% of your first $10K" became a flat 90/10 for new sign-ups. Per-payout caps on new $50K accounts were cut in April, and Live Funded Accounts now start with only 20% of the balance tradable. The community reaction shows in the numbers — Topstep's Trustpilot slid from ~4.5 to 3.4 in roughly a year (review).

…and better in the middle

Apex's "4.0" rebuild (March 2026) went the other way: monthly subscriptions became one-time fees, the widely disputed MAE rule died, payouts were automated to 24–48 hours, and the split became 100% from the first payout. An optional end-of-day trailing drawdown — which ignores intraday unrealized wicks — may be the single most trader-friendly rule change of the cycle (review).

FundedNext introduced a 24-hour payout guarantee backed by $1,000 compensation, and pays 15% of profits earned during the evaluation — while re-entering the US twice: futures in April 2025, CFDs via Match-Trader in November 2025 (review).

Trustpilot started fighting back

Two firms on our index — Upcomers and FundingTraders — had their TrustScores suspended in 2026 after Trustpilot removed batches of fake reviews. FundingTraders was also delisted from an aggregator over payout disputes, and its affiliated futures brand dissolved in May 2026 with traders reporting unpaid payouts. The lesson: a wall of five-star reviews is not evidence. Check whether the score is even active, read the 1-star cluster, and weight firms with a decade of history accordingly.

Crypto funding matured

Crypto-native firms stopped being a curiosity. Mubite executes against live Bybit liquidity rather than a simulated feed and pays in USDT within the hour; several CFD firms bolted crypto pairs onto MetaTrader in response. If your edge is on-chain volatility, the difference between real exchange fills and simulated crypto CFDs is now the first thing to check.

What to do with all this

  1. Re-read the payout policy of any firm you joined before 2026. Odds are it changed.
  2. Prefer firms that publish numbers — pass rates, payout statistics, processing medians. Topstep and E8 do; most don't.
  3. Treat suspended review scores as a red flag, not a neutral fact.
  4. Our comparison table tracks all of this per firm, updated as the industry moves.