Status: CLOSED as of January 18, 2026
Let me be upfront: FundingTicks is no longer operating. If you landed here because someone in a Discord mentioned it or you saw it on a comparison site that hasn’t been updated, this review will tell you exactly what happened. Why traders loved it early on, what went catastrophically wrong in December 2025, and what the whole saga should teach you about picking a prop firm going forward.
There’s real value in a postmortem. The FundingTicks story is one of the cleanest case studies the industry has produced on how a prop firm can go from a Trustpilot rating of 4.1 to a full shutdown in under 60 days.
What FundingTicks Actually Was
Launched in early 2025 out of Dubai, UAE, FundingTicks was the futures trading arm of FundingPips, a forex prop firm with genuine credibility and over $100 million paid out to traders. The connection mattered. Traders who knew FundingPips had a reasonable basis for trusting the new firm.
CEO Khaled Ayesh ran both operations. Worth noting: that $220M-plus payout history he kept citing on social media during the controversy was largely FundingPips, not FundingTicks. Keep that in mind.
Three program types were on offer. The Pro+ Challenge was the classic evaluation path, subscription-based with no activation fee, account sizes from $25K to $100K, minimum 3 trading days to pass, and a 40% daily consistency rule (no single day could exceed 40% of your profit target). Pass and you’re in a Master account with no recurring fees and payouts every 5 trading days.
FundingTicks One ran a similar 1-step evaluation structure. Monthly fees were $112 for the 25K account and $177 for 50K. Daily loss limit of 2% of initial balance, EOD trailing max loss of 3%, hard breach on either, payouts every 7 calendar days once funded.
Then there was the Zero plan, which was direct-to-funded: skip the evaluation entirely and start in the Master account right away. No student phase, which sounds great. But the consistency rule tightened hard at 25% daily cap instead of 40%. Every single week, no day could account for more than a quarter of your total profits. That’s stricter than almost anything else in the space.
The no-activation-fee structure was genuinely clever. Most futures prop firms hit you with $100-200 before you’ve traded a single tick. FundingTicks used subscriptions instead, keeping upfront risk lower for anyone who wanted to test it out.
Platforms and Rules
FundingTicks supported Tradovate, NinjaTrader, and TradingView. Copy trading was allowed up to $300K in allocation, which was unusual. Algorithmic trading was permitted. Overnight holds were fine, so swing traders weren’t immediately ruled out. News trading was not allowed within 2 minutes of Tier 1 events (on Master accounts specifically).
Payouts ran through RiseCrypto only. Crypto-only payout method. No wire transfers, no standard banking options. That’s a detail that got glossed over in a lot of early coverage, and it matters more than people thought it would.
The First 8 Months: Why Traders Actually Liked It
Real talk: the early reception was positive, and it wasn’t manufactured. Traders on Discord and Trustpilot through the summer and fall of 2025 were genuinely happy.
Fast credential delivery after purchase. Discord support that actually answered when you tagged someone. No payout denials for traders who followed the rules. Multiple traders reported receiving funds within 24 hours of submitting a request, sometimes faster than that. For a firm less than a year old, that builds trust fast.
The 90% profit split across all programs was hard to argue with. Most futures prop firms start you at 50-70% and call it a day. FundingTicks started at 90 from day one, which for scalpers and active traders compounds significantly over time.
Traders also appreciated the EOD trailing drawdown setup versus strict intraday daily loss limits. If you’ve traded at a firm where one bad 45-minute stretch gets you locked out of the rest of the session, you understand why the end-of-day calculation matters. Getting stopped mid-session on ES because of a $400 paper loss at 10 AM is brutal. FundingTicks’ structure gave traders more room to manage within a session.
Some traders completed the Pro+ challenge in 3 days. That’s legitimately not common.
The firm was pulling in traffic fast. By late 2025, Trustpilot showed over 1,700 reviews and the company had reportedly paid out $30 million in rewards across its lifespan. For a prop firm under a year old, that’s not nothing.
December 2025: The Rule Changes That Ended Everything
On December 17, 2025, FundingTicks announced a round of new trading rules. Here’s the thing: individually, some of those rules are defensible. Lots of firms have minimum hold times. Lots of firms cap withdrawals. It happens.
What happened at FundingTicks was different. They applied the changes retroactively.
The specific changes: a minimum 1-minute trade hold time (previously no minimum), profit split cut from 90% to 80%, required profitable days bumped from 5 to 6, minimum daily profit raised from $150 to $200, and new withdrawal caps.
Traders who had already passed their evaluations under the original rules woke up in breach. Accounts that had been building profits for weeks had those profits recalculated under the new rules. One trader posted on X showing their account dropped from $3,200 in profit to $751.62 overnight. Another reported $21,000 in profits removed from their account.
The 1-minute scalping rule deserves its own sentence because it was genuinely incoherent for futures trading. As one trader pointed out: NQ moves 10-12 points in under a minute on a regular day. That’s $200-240 per mini contract on a normal trending move. Forcing traders to hold minimum 60 seconds in a market like that isn’t a risk management tool, it’s a way to invalidate existing trades.
Trustpilot went from 4.1 to 3.2 within weeks. 38% of reviews were 1 star. Prop Firm Match pulled them from their listings entirely.
CEO Khaled took to social media. He acknowledged mistakes. He cited the $220M payout history. He didn’t reverse the decision immediately.
On December 27, the firm announced they’d reinstate profits deducted before December 16th and promised no future retroactive changes. The 1-minute rule stayed. The 80% profit split stayed.
It wasn’t enough.
January 18, 2026: The Shutdown
Less than a month after the retroactive rule backlash, the announcement landed:
“As a strategic decision, we are winding down FundingTicks’ operations. This decision reflects a clear, forward-looking strategy to concentrate resources and attention on areas where we deliver the greatest long-term value to our clients and partners.”
Standard shutdown language. The trading community’s translation was less diplomatic.
Wind-down terms by account type:
- Active Evals: Full refund, no conditions
- Master accounts that hit targets and met objectives: 80% reward split
- Master accounts that missed objectives: 20% split
- Live accounts in profit: Refund plus 90% of realized profit plus 20% of initial balance
- Live accounts at breakeven: Refund plus 20% of initial balance
- Live accounts in loss: Refund only
Customer support stayed accessible through January 31. New trading was stopped immediately.
What This Should Teach You
The “sister company of a reputable firm” argument only goes so far. FundingPips was legitimately well-regarded in the forex prop space. But that track record belonged to a different business model, different instrument class, different trader base. FundingTicks was less than a year old. There’s no shortcut for operational history.
The warning signs were there before December too. Traders had been reporting dashboard delays during high-volatility sessions for months. Some accounts sat in limbo waiting for manual reviews to push them from evaluation to Master status. Each individual report could be explained away. Together, they suggested a firm still figuring out its operational infrastructure.
Crypto-only payouts. This one feels obvious in hindsight but deserves to be said clearly: if a prop firm’s only payout method is a single crypto processor, you are depending on that processor’s reliability, liquidity, and continued operation. A firm with 5 payout options can have one fail and still pay you. A firm with one option can’t.
I’m also still thinking about the consistency rules. A 40% daily consistency cap is already on the stricter side. The Zero plan’s 25% was essentially saying that on any given day, your one best trade better not be too dominant in your weekly results. If the market hands you a gift and you run a clean $800 day in 2 hours then stop, you’ve eaten 25% of your week’s consistency budget in one session. That kind of math creates weird psychological pressure. Traders end up managing the consistency rule more than they manage their actual trades.
That’s not good prop firm design. That’s a rule that exists for the firm’s benefit, not the trader’s.
Should You Trade with FundingTicks Now?
No. It’s closed.
If you were trading there when the shutdown happened and haven’t sorted your refund situation yet: the support deadline was January 31. If that’s passed, your options are limited to reaching out directly through whatever contact information was provided in the shutdown announcement. Based on what traders reported, the refund process was actually being processed in good faith for most eval accounts.
For everyone else, the useful question is: what did FundingTicks get right that you should look for somewhere else? The subscription model with no activation fee was smart. EOD trailing drawdown beats intraday daily loss limits for most trading styles. A 90% profit split from day one is possible to find at legitimate firms. Platform flexibility across Tradovate, NinjaTrader, and TradingView in a single program was a genuine advantage.
Those features exist at other firms. Firms with a few years of operational history and a Trustpilot rating that wasn’t falling off a cliff.
The FundingTicks story isn’t a reason to avoid new prop firms entirely. It’s a reason to size your positions accordingly when you do, spread across multiple firms, and watch closely how a firm handles its first real crisis before you go all-in.