There’s a compressed version of the ProjectX story that fits in one sentence: the platform went from industry-wide infrastructure to one firm’s exclusive property in under two years. That sentence leaves out everything that made the story worth telling, and worth understanding if you’re a futures trader deciding where to set up right now.
So let’s back up.
From Sim2Funded to ProjectX
ProjectX grew out of Sim2Funded Solutions as a technology provider for futures funding evaluators and prop firms. The product was never built for retail traders shopping around for a charting package. It was end-to-end infrastructure: account customization, risk rules and monitoring, liquidations, statistics, and permissioning, bundled with a trading front end that firms could brand as their own.
For a while it spread fast. Firms that didn’t want to build their own tech stack could license a working platform and launch an evaluation program without starting from zero. The ambition was clearly to become the infrastructure layer for futures prop trading broadly, not just one firm’s backend.
What the Platform Actually Did Well
The core product was well thought out, and one decision stands above the rest. ProjectX partnered with TradingView so traders could execute directly through the TradingView charting interface. Prop platforms have a long history of asking you to abandon the chart setup you’ve spent years building. This one didn’t ask for that trade-off.
The Gateway API is the other piece that separated it from a typical white-label build. It’s a REST API covering historical and real-time market data, order placement and management, and custom risk tooling, with support for Python, Java, and .NET. You can build lockouts, alerts, and limits that match how you actually trade rather than accepting whatever came configured out of the box. Access requires an active subscription.
Risk tooling is what the prop firms themselves cared about. Native liquidations and rule monitoring built into the platform, not delegated to a third party or left to broker enforcement. For a firm trying to protect capital from a trader chasing losses on a bad NQ session, that’s a real operational advantage. (Enforcement is only half the story, though. How trailing drawdown actually behaves varies between firms a lot more than most traders expect before they get caught by one.)
The Wind-Down
ProjectX made the decision to wind down its third-party service offering, supporting partners through a sunset date of February 28, 2026. Traders wanting to continue on the platform were pointed to one destination: topstep.com/topstepx.
Firms that had built their entire evaluation infrastructure around ProjectX had a hard deadline and a migration problem. Traders who had picked a specific firm because it ran ProjectX had no path to stay on the platform other than moving to Topstep.
Then on April 1, 2026, Topstep acquired The Futures Desk, with TFD’s technology folding directly into TopstepX and co-founders Josh Schwartzberg and Brian Ford joining Topstep. Whatever remained of the multi-firm era closed out there.
Here’s the thing that made this land hard: the issue was never the product. ProjectX had a strong technical reputation and traders genuinely preferred it. It was the business decision.
What ProjectX Is Today
Today, ProjectX is TopstepX. If you want the platform as a trader, Topstep is the door.
The numbers behind the current build:
- 99.99% platform uptime, measured as a monthly average since the start of 2026
- 150,000+ average daily active traders
- 3M+ orders per day
- Browser-based, no installation, TradingView charts built in
The Tilt is the feature you can’t get anywhere else. It aggregates real-time sentiment across the Topstep trading community and shows which way the crowd is leaning as the market moves. Treat it as a contrarian signal or ignore it entirely, but nobody else has it.
Risk tooling is where the platform does its real work, and the design philosophy is more interesting than a checkbox list suggests. You set a Personal Daily Loss Limit and the platform helps you hold to it. You set a Personal Daily Profit Target and the account locks when you hit it, which kills the “one more trade” impulse that has ended more good days than bad setups ever have. Daily and weekly trade limits cap overtrading. Account lockout lets you shut yourself down manually on a rough day.
Notice these are trader-controlled, not purely firm-enforced. That’s a different animal from risk systems built only to protect the firm’s capital.
Training Camp sits alongside it, an interactive lesson series on trading fundamentals and futures markets, exclusive to TopstepX and aimed at traders who aren’t ready for a Combine yet.
Instruments
Coverage is broad. ES, NQ, RTY, and YM on the equity index side, with MES, MNQ, M2K, and MYM on micros. CL, QM, MCL, NG, QG, MNG, and RB for energy. GC, MGC, SI, SIL, PL, HG, and MHG in metals. The treasury curve from ZT through UB. Grains and softs including ZC, ZW, ZS, ZM, and ZL. HE and LE in livestock. MBT and MET for crypto exposure.
Currency futures are on the list too (6E, 6J, 6B, 6A, 6C, 6S, 6M, 6N, plus E7, M6E, and M6B), though spot forex, stocks, options, and CFDs aren’t part of the program at all. Trading is limited to futures on CME, COMEX, NYMEX, and CBOT. Product availability can shift with market volatility.
What It Costs
Combine pricing is subscription-based and rebills monthly until you pass or cancel.
| Account | Monthly | Profit Target | Max Loss Limit | Contracts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $50K | $49 | $3,000 | $2,000 | 5 mini / 50 micro |
| $100K | $99 | $6,000 | $3,000 | 10 mini / 100 micro |
| $150K | $199 | $9,000 | $4,500 | 15 mini / 150 micro |
Consistency target is 50% across all three tiers, which is the number that trips up traders who make most of their profit in one session. If consistency rules are new to you, read up before you start rather than after. Reset fees match the monthly price on each tier, and a reset credit comes with every rebill. Express Funded activation runs $149, paid after you pass on the Standard account.
Profit split is 90/10, with payouts up to $12,000 per account depending on tier and payout track. Payout approval sits at 99.26%, and average instant payout times run under 9 seconds for US traders using RTP with Aeropay, subject to your bank supporting real-time transactions.
Real talk on the odds: from January through December 2025, 16.8% of Trading Combines initiated were completed successfully, and 33.3% of participants who reached the Funded Level received a payout. Combines are hard to pass. That’s the design, not a defect.
The Practical Decision
ProjectX built something that worked and that traders preferred. The TradingView integration removed a genuine friction point. The risk tooling gave firms something they actually needed. The API opened the door for anyone wanting to automate. It was a well-executed product, and the technical quality was never really in dispute.
The question for futures traders now isn’t whether the platform was good. It clearly was. The question is whether you’re comfortable with the arrangement it ended up in: one firm, one platform, no alternatives inside that ecosystem.
There’s a structural point worth naming plainly. When the firm you trade with owns the only platform you’re permitted to use, you lose optionality. A connectivity problem on a broker-agnostic setup lets you route around it. Here there’s nothing to reach for. That’s not a knock on Topstep specifically, and Topstep’s payout track record is the longest in the space, so the firm itself isn’t the concern. Concentration is. Price that into the decision consciously rather than discovering it mid-session during a fast CL print.
If the ProjectX experience is what you’re after, Topstep is where you get it. The Tilt, Training Camp, and the trader-controlled risk suite are genuinely good reasons to want it.
If you’d rather keep platform choice and firm choice separate, that’s a different search, and it’s a reasonable thing to want. Our best futures prop firms list is the place to start narrowing that down, and the trading tools breakdowns cover what you’d actually be trading on once you pick.