Platform Dependency: February 2024 and After

In February 2024 MetaQuotes withdrew MetaTrader access from prop firms, beginning with the termination of True Forex Funds’ MT4 and MT5 licences on 2 February. Within nine months MetaTrader’s share among prop firms fell from 48% to 24%, and industry trackers counted 80 to 100 firms gone during 2024. A software vendor’s commercial decision reshaped more businesses in this category than any regulator’s action has.

Between 2024 and 2026 at least five separate instances are documented of a platform or infrastructure provider ending a firm’s product by written notice. Over the same period, no European regulator created a licensing regime for the product and none prohibited it. Platform dependency is one surface among several in the risks that are not your trading. It is the one with the fullest dated record.

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What actually happened in February 2024?

The trigger was a licensing decision, not a rule change and not a regulatory order.

2 February 2024. MetaQuotes terminated the MT4 and MT5 licences of True Forex Funds without prior warning, as reported by FX News Group. The firm closed on 13 May 2024.

11 February 2024. Purple Trading announced it would cease serving a number of prop-firm clients. Trade-press reporting named Funded Engineer, AquaFunded, Goat Funded Trader, Skilled Funded Traders and The Funded Trader among those affected.

14 February 2024. The chief executive of Funding Pips confirmed that MetaQuotes had stopped service over active US accounts. BlackBull Markets, which had grey-labelled its own MT5 licence to the firm, was in the words of its chief business development officer “forced to immediately shut down Funding Pips as a client and their server on our Demo environment”, as reported by Finance Magnates. The resulting full outage was communicated to traders as urgent maintenance, and migration to Match-Trader took roughly a week.

29 February 2024. Eightcap terminated brokerage service to all of its prop-firm clients. FX News Group named Blue Guardian, Funded Trading Plus, Glow Node, Lark Funding, Skilled Funded Traders, Smart Prop Trader and The Funded Trader among them. The reported trigger was the risk that MetaQuotes would withdraw MT4/MT5 licences from brokers serving prop firms with active US accounts.

The reasons MetaQuotes was reported to have given: regulatory exposure created by US clients, with an internal communication stating that platforms serving US clients should hold FINRA or NFA regulation; misuse of grey-label licences, where prop firms reached the platform through a partner broker’s white label rather than a direct contract; and demo servers, which under MetaQuotes’ contracts generate no licence revenue.

Where did the firms go?

To four alternatives, quickly. Match-Trader, cTrader, TradeLocker and DXtrade absorbed most of the migration, with Sirix also named in Finance Magnates’ coverage. Funding Pips moved to Match-Trader and later added cTrader and TradeLocker. MetaTrader’s share among prop firms fell from 48% to 24% over the following nine months.

The migration itself was a second source of failure. The Funded Trader’s move to DXtrade in March 2024 was followed by a breakdown in account reconciliation and a pause of all operations on 28 March 2024; the firm returned after roughly five months. A platform change is not a neutral swap when balances, drawdown anchors and trade history must be carried across.

Did MetaTrader come back?

Partly, and on different terms. Funding Pips restored MT5 in March 2025 after roughly thirteen months, under its own direct MetaQuotes licence rather than a broker’s white label, with the United States and Canada excluded. Funding Traders restored MT5 after registering in Saint Lucia; Wall Street Funded established a broker in Saint Lucia for the same purpose.

Industry sources cited by Finance Magnates describe the current position as acceptance of prop firms on two conditions: a direct licence rather than a white label through a partner broker, and no service to US clients. TradeInformer reported in May 2025 that firms were no longer required to combine prop and brokerage URLs, and that a new pricing model for prop accounts was believed to have been introduced, though it could not confirm this. TradeInformer also noted that Saint Lucia has no CFD regulatory regime, so a registration there is a company rather than a licence — with consequences for advertising eligibility on Google and Meta.

Direct licensing became the price of access, and brokerage entities appeared across the industry from 2024 onward. The effect is documented directly at one firm: TradeInformer attributes FundedNext’s launch of its broker arm, FNmarkets, to MetaQuotes’ requirement that a firm hold a brokerage entity to reach the platform.

Did it happen again?

Match-Trade and SurgeTrader, May 2024. Match-Trade withdrew SurgeTrader’s licence seven days before the firm closed on 24 May 2024. No alternative platform was found. SurgeTrader’s chief executive stated that approximately 10% of payout obligations were not met.

ProjectX, February 2026. The third-party service that Topstep’s own platform was forked from shut down.

NinjaTrader and Tradovate, 12 July 2026. NinjaTrader terminated its contract with Alpha Futures, and Tradovate went with it. The reported trigger was Alpha’s launch of AlphaTrader as a competing product. The firm’s flagship Premium plan closed the same day, with more than $25 million in payouts on that plan over two months and “significant operating losses” cited in its statement.

The pattern has repeated at least four times: MetaQuotes, Purple Trading and Eightcap in 2024, Match-Trade in May 2024, ProjectX in February 2026, NinjaTrader and Tradovate in July 2026.

Timeline

All entries are press reporting of vendor and firm announcements rather than filings, and are as of 31 July 2026. Rows without a link are ones for which our research holds the event and date from trade-press coverage but no single canonical article URL; they are included because the dates are specific and checkable, and flagged so that the difference in provenance is visible. Where a firm’s own words are quoted, they are attributed to the firm.

Why does platform concentration produce this outcome?

This section is our reading of the events above rather than a finding, and we set it out as reasoning so it can be checked against the same record.

The chain is three contracts long. The platform vendor licenses software to a licensed entity. The prop firm obtains access to that software, historically often through a partner broker’s white label rather than directly. The trader contracts with the prop firm — or, in several groups, with a separate challenge entity that is not the licensed entity at all, a structure described in the two-entity pattern.

You have no contractual standing at either end of that chain. A termination between the vendor and the broker, or between the broker and the firm, ends your ability to trade without your being a party to the decision or notified of it. And the trigger sits with the party furthest from you, over something that is not trading at all: in February 2024 it was US client exposure and licence structure, in July 2026 a firm launching a competing product. Nothing a trader did, or could have done, entered into any of it.

The absence of a remedy completes the picture. In the rule sets we reviewed there is no provision suspending drawdown limits during a platform interruption and no compensation for a position that could not be closed — the point covered in detail in what the rules say when execution fails. The commercial risk of the chain breaking is therefore borne, in the published documents, by the account holder.

What can a trader observe before buying?

The asymmetry is specific.

Published, and checkable in a few minutes:

• Which platforms a firm currently offers, listed on the product pages. Firms running on a single platform are visibly running on a single point of failure.
• Whether MetaTrader is offered to residents of your country, since the US restriction has persisted through every stage of this sequence.
• Whether the firm operates a licensed brokerage entity in the same group, which since 2024 has been closely tied to direct platform access.

Generally not published:

• Whether the firm holds a direct licence from the platform vendor or reaches the platform through another broker’s white label. This distinction decided which firms survived February 2024, and it is normally invisible from the outside.
• The term, notice period and termination conditions of the agreement between the firm and its platform vendor or broker.
• Whether an offshore registration in the group is a functioning brokerage business or exists to satisfy a platform vendor’s requirement. TradeInformer’s observation about Saint Lucia is directly on this point: a jurisdiction with no CFD regime cannot issue a CFD licence, so what exists there is a company.

A funded account that runs on two platforms at two different vendors is not safer in a trading sense. It is simply less likely to disappear because of a letter you never see.

What is not on the record

The document that would tell you most about continuity risk is the one that is never published. No firm in this review publishes the term, the notice period or the termination conditions of its agreement with a platform vendor, and every event in the timeline above began inside an agreement of that kind. The dates are public. The instrument is not.

Related: the closure record for 2024 to 2026.

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Written by the upme.com research desk. Terminations and closures above are reported as the named trade publications reported them, with dates and without any attribution of cause or fault to the firms involved. Corrections to the address on our sourcing page. Nothing here is investment advice.

Sources

Every factual claim above is drawn from one of the documents below. Where a document has been superseded since the date given, tell us and the piece is corrected with a dated line.

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