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We coded 369 prop firm reviews for "did they pay". Here is what the number can and cannot support

peacetemple — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 12:51:10 +0000

We coded 369 prop firm reviews for "did they pay". Here is what the number can and cannot support

A review saying "they refused my payout" is evidence that someone wrote it. It is not evidence that the refusal was unjustified, and it is certainly not a rate. Most of the work in coding reviews is refusing to pretend otherwise.

I run a comparison site for crypto prop firms, which is an affiliate business, so read the rest with that in mind. The coding below is published in full, including the firms that look bad in it.

What I did

For each of twenty crypto prop firm profiles on Trustpilot, I read the most recent twenty reviews in full and coded two things: whether the review was negative at all, and whether it described a problem with a payout — a refusal, a delay without explanation, a deduction, or an account closed after a profitable period.

369 reviews, read by hand on 5 November. 148 coded negative. 54 describing a payout problem, about 15% of the sample.

Coding is binary and it is about the text. I did not check whether any complaint was justified, I could not see the firm's side of any dispute, and I did not code "the platform froze on news" as a payout problem even though it might end in one.

The arithmetic that kills the obvious reading

Here is why "13 of 20 reviews at Firm A describe payout problems" is not a complaint rate.

Firm A had 365 reviews in the previous year. Firm B had eight. Twenty recent reviews from each is the same size of sample and 5% versus 250% of the population. A firm with 40,000 reviews that pays 99.5% of requests on time still produces complaints in absolute numbers that dwarf a small firm's entire customer base.

So the honest statement is: of the 20 most recent reviews I read, 13 described a payout problem. That is a fact about the sample. It becomes a fact about the firm only if you also know the denominator, which the sampling does not give you.

What the sample is genuinely good for is triage. If you are about to pay a firm, read its last twenty reviews and count how many are about money not arriving. You do not need a rate to learn something from that.

What showed up in the reading

Thirteen of AquaFunded's twenty recent reviews described a payout problem. DNA Funded and Instant Funding had seven each, E8Markets and Blue Guardian six. Breakout, HyroTrader, Fundedbit, City Traders Imperium and FundedNext had none in their samples.

Eight of the twenty profiles displayed no Trustpilot score at all. Several carried Trustpilot's own notice that the score was unavailable following a breach of its guidelines. That is a fact about the platform's view of those reviews, and it is not the same as a firm that refused to pay. It does mean a withheld score can be made to look like a good one in a screenshot, so check the profile rather than the quote.

The recurring complaint shapes were consistent enough to be worth naming: payouts refused after a strong month, payouts delayed past a stated window without explanation, and accounts closed after a profitable run with the fee not returned. Whether those are bad faith or bad risk management I cannot tell from the text, and a dataset should not pretend to.

Why publish the coding at all

Because the alternative is a star rating. A score out of five from someone who has never traded a funded account is an invented number with a decimal point, and it is the most common thing in this niche.

The coded sample is also a dataset: every review carries its date, its URL and a verbatim quote, so anyone can re-read the same twenty reviews and disagree with my coding. That is the point. A claim you can check is worth more than a confident one you cannot.

Coded sample, CC BY 4.0: https://cryptopropfirms.com/complaints/
The DOI, if you want to cite it: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24053513
The price and terms dataset: https://cryptopropfirms.com/prices/

If you send me a firm whose reviews deserve a second pass, the sample gets re-read and the page changes. Corrections are the only part of this that compounds.

Of 21 crypto prop firms, none sells a no-KYC account

peacetemple — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 12:17:38 +0000

Of the twenty-one crypto prop firms I read, thirteen want identity documents before you place a trade, seven wait until you ask for a withdrawal, and one publishes no verification policy at all. Not one sells a no-KYC account, despite the phrase sitting in the title of a page on nearly every one of their sites.

I run a comparison site for these firms. Over the past few weeks I read each firm's own pricing, rules and FAQ pages and recorded what they say with the URL it came from and the date I read it. This is what that reading found, and it is mostly about the gap between what a firm advertises and what its terms actually commit to.

Nobody sells "no KYC"

Search for a crypto prop firm with no KYC and you will find dozens of pages promising exactly that. I read the terms of twenty-one of them and checked each one against the firm's own page on 8 November. None sells an account you can be paid from without showing identity documents. What varies is where the gate sits.

Thirteen check before you are activated: HyroTrader, Breakout, Fundedbit, Kraken Prop, Propr, Velotrade, Funded Trader Markets, FX2 Funding, For Traders, City Traders Imperium, FundedNext, E8Markets and MyFundedPerps. You upload a passport and take a selfie before the funded account goes live. HyroTrader is the one that reads like a payout firm and is not: its FAQ lists "KYC & Agreement" before "Connect Your Funded Account", and the first time I published this list I had it in the wrong group.

Seven wait until you ask for money: Crypto Fund Trader, Bitfunded, Upscale, FXIFY, Instant Funding, DNA Funded and Blue Guardian. You can trade for weeks, pass, request a payout, and only then discover the gate. Bitfunded is conditional even then, asking for documents only once you reach $10,000 in cumulative profit.

One publishes nothing at all. AquaFunded's terms run to about 41,000 characters, in two identical copies, and contain no mention of KYC, identity, verification, passport or proof of address. That is not the same as requiring none, and it is not the same as requiring documents: it is a firm that has not said, and a comparison site that fills that gap with a guess is inventing a fact.

There is one outright contradiction among the twenty-one. Upscale's binding Terms of Use require a KYC check before a withdrawal can be executed, while its FAQ and a dedicated no-KYC page state that no documents are asked for at sign-up, at purchase or at payout. The contract wins here, because a marketing page cannot override what a buyer accepts at checkout, and both are printed on the page so a reader can see the disagreement rather than my resolution of it.

A 6% drawdown is three different rules

Drawdown is where challenges are lost, and the percentage is the least informative part of the rule. Of the twenty-one firms, nine use a static floor fixed to the starting balance, nine use a different rule depending on which plan you bought, and three trail the number against your own peak equity.

Take one firm selling two plans at the same account size. Crypto Fund Trader's Accelerated plan runs a 6% trailing drawdown that moves up as your balance makes new highs, a 4% daily limit and a 10% target. Its Evaluation plan runs a static 10%, a 5% daily limit and an 8% then 5% target. Two products, one ladder, two entirely different ways to fail. Publish "6% drawdown" and you have described one of them.

Trailing rules also differ in where they stop. FXIFY trails to the initial balance and locks there once you are 6% up. Upscale's Turbo plan trails 6% of your highest balance with no daily limit and no profit target at all, which makes it a different instrument wearing the same number.

Before paying, find the words "static", "trailing" or "highest balance" in the terms and check whether the rule stops moving at any point. If the page gives you only a percentage, the page has not told you the rule.

The payout rail is part of the product

Eight of the twenty-one pay in USDT, six in USDC, two in BTC. Bitfunded lists USDT only. Breakout pays USDC on ERC-20. Several offer a bank or card rail through a third party instead of a chain, and a few offer both.

That choice decides what your payout costs you. An ERC-20 transfer at the wrong moment can eat a meaningful share of a small withdrawal in gas, and a stated payout time usually measures approval, not settlement. If you cannot receive the specific asset on the specific chain, a 90% split is arithmetic you never get to use.

Eight of twenty review profiles show no score

When I checked Trustpilot for each firm, eight profiles displayed no score at all: AquaFunded, Instant Funding, E8Markets, Crypto Fund Trader, Velotrade, Funded Trader Markets, For Traders and Upscale. Several carried Trustpilot's own notice that the score was unavailable because of a breach of its guidelines.

That is a fact about the platform's view of those reviews. It is not the same as a firm that refused to pay, and it is not the same as a firm with no customers. It does mean a withheld score can look like a good one in a screenshot, so check the profile rather than the quote.

Fifty-four of 369 recent reviews describe a payout problem

I read the most recent twenty reviews on each of twenty firm profiles, 369 in total, and counted the ones describing trouble getting paid. Fifty-four did, about 15% of what I read. AquaFunded accounted for thirteen of its twenty. DNA Funded and Instant Funding had seven each, E8Markets and Blue Guardian six. Breakout, HyroTrader, Fundedbit, City Traders Imperium and FundedNext had none in the sample.

The number is a share of a sample, not a complaint rate. A firm with tens of thousands of reviews will surface more complaints than one with eight, and twenty reviews is a small window on any of them. What it is good for is a starting point: read the last twenty reviews of the firm you are about to pay, and count how many are about money not arriving.

What the dataset does with this

Every figure carries the page it was read from and the date, and the pages are generated from that record, so a number cannot drift away from its source. Where a firm publishes nothing, the cell says "Not published" and stays empty rather than borrowing a competitor's figure.

There are no star ratings. I have not traded a funded account at any of these firms, and a score out of five from me would be an invented number with a decimal point. The studies of support and of payout complaints are written as counts of what is published, with the sample size next to every finding.

The data is free under CC BY 4.0, in a CSV with 386 rows and a JSON file with the same records plus per-firm sources. If you are choosing between two firms this week, check the drawdown type rather than its size, when identity documents are requested, which asset and chain the payout arrives on, and the last twenty reviews sorted by newest.

I run cryptopropfirms.com, which is an affiliate business: it earns commission when someone opens a funded account through a link on the site. The dataset, the complaints study and the support study are published regardless of whether a firm pays commission, and sixteen of the twenty-one firms currently pay none.