There’s a short but wild story packed into ProjectX’s timeline. Roughly 2 years from scrappy rebrand to industry darling to exclusive property of one of the biggest names in futures prop trading. If you were around the futures prop space between mid-2024 and early 2026, you watched the whole arc play out in real time.
Here’s what happened, and what it means if you’re trading today.
Where It Started: Sim2Funded
ProjectX is the new identity of Sims2Funded, a platform known for offering backend support and technology to futures prop firms. The rebrand landed in August 2024, and the announcement was blunt: six additional prop firms launching in 45 days and retail trading just around the corner.
That energy made sense. ProjectX began as a rebrand of Sims2Funded Solutions in mid-2024, built not for retail trading, but to empower prop firms and serious traders. The pitch was simple. Take the clunky, desktop-heavy world of futures prop trading and replace it with something browser-native, fast, and actually pleasant to use.
Traders noticed. The platform spread quickly across the futures prop ecosystem. Firms like One Top Futures, Trading Lucid, Tradify, Blue Guardian Futures, Tick Tok Trader and others were all running on ProjectX. For a while, it genuinely felt like the platform was becoming the infrastructure layer for the entire futures prop industry. Now, it came to an unexpected end.
What Made It Good
Honest answer? The execution on the core product was smart.
ProjectX combined high-quality trading data sources with high-end charting tools, trader-friendly interfaces, web and mobile trading out of the box, and risk controls. The TradingView integration was a big deal. If you’ve ever tried to convince a retail trader to switch from TradingView charts to some proprietary DOM-only interface, you know the friction. ProjectX removed that friction almost entirely.
As a licensed data redistributor, ProjectX provided unfiltered depth of market data hundreds of levels deep at millisecond update intervals, and the pricing on CME data was notably aggressive compared to alternatives. Traders doing order flow on ES or NQ had a legitimately better setup than most retail platforms offered.
The risk tooling is where prop firms fell in love with it. Native risk control tools let traders configure max daily loss, profit-target lockouts, automatic liquidation, and manual lockout directly inside the platform. Not enforced by a third party. Not relying on the broker to flatten your position. Built into the core. For firms trying to protect their capital from traders going full revenge mode on a losing NQ day, that’s not a small thing. If you want to understand how these trailing drawdown mechanics actually work under the hood, the rules vary more than most traders expect.
The platform also offered a powerful REST API letting firms manage user accounts, enforce risk rules, and trigger actions. Smaller prop firms could spin up evaluations without building their own tech stack from scratch. That’s the actual reason adoption spread so fast.
So yeah. It was good. Traders liked it. Firms liked it. The community was genuinely positive about where the platform was heading.
The Topstep Partnership (And What It Became)
TopstepX was the first commercial iteration of ProjectX’s flagship product (source). Topstep and the ProjectX team built TopstepX together, and the platform launched with some genuinely interesting proprietary features layered on top of the ProjectX base. The standout was The Tilt, a sentiment indicator that aggregates positioning across all traders on the platform to show whether the majority is leaning long or short on a given instrument. Useful as a contrarian signal? Debatable. But it was something you couldn’t get anywhere else.
Over 82% of recently registered Topstep traders chose TopstepX, and TopstepX pass rates were almost twice as high as all other platforms, roughly 86% higher, based on data from January through June 2025 (source). Whether that’s because the platform is genuinely better or because it was being heavily pushed is worth thinking about. Probably both.
Starting August 1st, 2025, all new Trading Combines and Resets at Topstep had to be done on TopstepX. Legacy platforms like Tradovate and NinjaTrader still worked for active funded accounts, but new evaluations were TopstepX only. The handwriting was on the wall at that point.
The November 2025 Announcement
In late November 2025, the industry received news that completely changed the trajectory of ProjectX. ProjectX notified prop firms that it would revoke third-party licensing and end support for all firms except Topstep, effective February 2026.
The community reaction was immediate and not kind. Social media, Discord servers, and X were flooded with complaints. Firms that had built their entire prop firm challenge infrastructure around ProjectX suddenly had a hard deadline and a migration problem on their hands. Traders who had specifically chosen certain prop firms because they offered ProjectX had no say in what came next.
The official ProjectX statement cited shifts in operational demands and upcoming compliance reporting, oversight, and audit requirements as making third-party support no longer sustainable. That explanation landed with about as much warmth as you’d expect. Unofficially, most of the industry sees this as a strategic exclusivity deal. By going all-in with Topstep, ProjectX simplified its business model. The cost was trust across the broader prop trading ecosystem.
ProjectX had a strong reputation, and many traders were genuinely happy with how the platform worked. That’s what made the announcement sting. This wasn’t a platform that had lost its way technically. It was a business decision.
What ProjectX Is Now
Today, ProjectX is TopstepX. That’s it. If you want to continue using the platform as a trader, the only path is through topstep.com/topstepx.
In some ways, that focus has sharpened the product. Direct CME market data with 50ms updates, integrated risk rules like auto-liquidation and trailing loss limits, and full browser-based access with no installation all remain core features. The Tilt indicator is exclusive to TopstepX. Copy trading is built in natively.
That said, the platform’s growing pains are real and well-documented. Traders describe beta-stage instability including ghost orders, chart lag, and fill errors. For scalpers working ES during the open, that’s not a theoretical concern. There’s also a deeper concern being raised by traders: when the prop firm you trade with owns the only platform they allow you to use, traders lose leverage and concentration risk increases. That’s a fair point. When Rithmic or Tradovate have problems, you can route around it. When TopstepX goes down, there’s no alternative.
Topstep appears to be actively working on stability improvements, and more recent reviews from late 2025 note fewer critical issues than the initial migration period. It’s getting better. Whether it’s gotten good enough depends on what kind of trader you are.
The Honest Take
ProjectX had a moment. From mid-2024 through most of 2025, it was legitimately the most interesting thing happening in futures prop trading technology. Clean UI, TradingView integration, smart risk tooling, competitive data pricing. Traders preferred it. Firms relied on it. The vision for where it could go as neutral industry infrastructure was genuinely compelling.
That’s not what happened.
What happened instead is that ProjectX became one firm’s proprietary platform. If you want to use it today, you’re trading with Topstep. That’s the deal. Topstep is a serious, well-established prop firm with a long track record, so it’s not like you’re being pointed toward a sketchy operation. But the transition has cost something real in terms of choice and competition in the ecosystem.
If you’re specifically interested in the ProjectX trading experience, the path is clear: start a Topstep Trading Combine. For everything else, Tradovate and Rithmic-based setups on platforms like NinjaTrader or Quantower remain solid alternatives.
Check the full best futures prop firms list if you’re still figuring out which firm to pair with whatever platform you land on. And if you’re hunting for a deal on your evaluation, current trading offers are worth a look before you pay full price.