🧵 1 Divorce, $30+ million raised, $25B+ in volume. How did I end up here?

I believe within the next 5 years an on-chain prop firm will be among the top 3 largest in the world including CFDs and Futures firms. The market runs 24/7, the range of tradable assets is virtually unlimited, the infrastructure is verifiable, and payouts/revenue are transparent and provable on-chain.

FTMO was founded in 2015 by two Czech students, and today they've paid out over $1 billion to traders around the world. The idea was simple: test traders before giving them capital, separate the good from the bad, and split the profits. That model changed everything. For the first time in trading history, talent was enough. You didn't need starting capital, a connection at a bank, or a finance MBA. Just an edge and the discipline to prove it. The problem is, FTMO was built for a completely different market. Traditional forex, 5 trading days a week, markets that close on Friday and reopen Monday, a limited set of assets that hasn't changed much in 30 years. The crypto-native prop firm is the next step and it needs to be built differently. A flexible platform, made for traders, that moves with the market. Instant funding, on-chain transparency, payouts that can't be contested, and access to every asset class that matters: perps, spot, RWA, prediction markets. Perpetuals runs 24/7 and the opportunities are always there, everywhere. Happy to build alongside best firms to bring things up.

Super excited to launch Vertical with Instant Funding available. Fyi, it's a new path where traders can get to the funded stage directly, without passing any evaluation. But what does that mean for the firm? It's a different kind of risk management. The rules have to be set up differently from the evaluation ones, so that both traders and the firm stay sustainable. Thanks to our risk manager (I'll name him soon), we were able to build what I genuinely think is one of the best Instant Funding offers in the perps prop industry, with pricing in the 3 digits, even for a 100K account. You choose your size, from $5K to $100K, get access instantly, and trade under conditions designed to be as close as possible to what you'll face throughout your trading career. And your first payout isn't tied to completing a phase. It follows your performance. That's the idea behind Instant Funding. Curious to see how traders use it. Feel free to send your feedback on discord, here to improve and learn everyday.

We plugged Claude directly into Vertical's analytics through MCP. Now you can ask things like: "What's my win rate on BTC longs after a 3% pullback?" "Did my Sharpe drop when funding flipped negative?" "Which setups are leaking PnL since March?" Yes, I'm an Analytics Maxi lol

The crypto prop firm market is massively underrated, and almost NOBODY is seeing the size of the opportunity. Everyone looks at how many prop firms exist, how many challenges they sell, and how many traders get funded. That’s fine, but it misses the bigger picture. The real TAM for crypto prop firms sits at the intersection of 3 massive markets that have never really been brought together: 1/ Traditional forex traders Forex does trillions in daily volume and has millions of experienced traders already familiar with the prop firm model. Most haven’t even considered that crypto can offer them a similar model, but with more markets to trade and on-chain infrastructure that can make the whole system far more transparent. 2/ Retail crypto traders Tens of millions of people already trade crypto, but many of them simply don’t have enough capital to trade meaningful size and fully capitalize on their edge. Prop firms solve the capital problem. 3/ RWA perps Stocks, forex, commodities increasingly moving on-chain and trading 24/7. New assets → new markets → new traders who need capital to trade them at scale. And all three markets are starting to converge. A crypto prop firm built for all three isn’t targeting a “niche.” It’s positioning itself at the intersection of what could become one of the largest pools of trading activity over the next decade.

In 2026, points farming is dead for service-type products. The problem isn't attracting people. It's that it attracts the wrong people. A points program incentivizes users to show up for the token rewards, not for the product. The result: projects end up with a dopamine-fueled user base that vanishes the exact moment the token drops. And to run a big airdrop that actually retains people, you need a big raise behind it. Most projects don't have that, so they attract low-ticket farmers who pretend to use the product, grab the points, and leave. You end up with metrics that look like growth, but in reality there's zero real retention around whats truly a prop firm and what does it give you access to. I think the right approach is balance. Points can exist, but they have to come second to educating users about the product. If users understand why your product actually helps them, points become a bonus, not the main reason they're there! That's when you make the switch: you go from a base of farmers to real users who keep coming back because they love what you built. Retention comes from the product, never from the points. (Yes, the title was a bit clickbaity, but that was so you'd click lol.)

Prop firms are going to do for trading what Robinhood did for stocks. Robinhood didn't invent stock trading. It just made accessible what already existed for an "elite." Before Robinhood, opening a brokerage account meant paying a commission on every trade. The minimum deposit was often several hundred dollars, and the platform was built for professionals. Before you come at me: yes, technically the stock market was open to everyone. But in reality, it was mostly reserved for people with capital and knowledge. Robinhood completely broke that: 0 commissions, an account opened in 5 minutes, fractional shares. Overnight, 18-yo could access the same markets as fund managers. The result: 25M+ accounts created, 10M monthly active users. Basically, they let an entire generation start investing. Crypto prop firms are going to do the exact same thing for trading. The retail trader market has exploded in recent years, and it's about to explode even more. A lot of people are showing up to the markets without much capital: $500-$5,000. Prop firms let all of these people trade the markets with real capital, capital that could actually let them make a living. 3%/month on $1,000 is $30. So sure, you can treat the wife to a nice McDonald's. 3%/month on $100,000 is $3,000. Now we're talking about a completely different life. It's not magic. It's just basic capital math. The difference between Robinhood and prop firms: - Robinhood gave you access to the markets. - Prop firms give you access to capital. In 5 years, asking a good trader why they trade their own capital instead of a funded account will sound as strange as asking why you were paying $10 commissions per trade in 2015.

16 hours later : +200 new traders +$27,33M in volume added +$2M in funded capital Now we are going to put light on real traders experience, Instant Funding capital, real prop's risk management. Education phase to start.

Here is the product traders have been looking for. Prop firms future is bright. Instant funding account from $5k to $100k, now available. Best charting and execution platform. Built from scratch Will now post more about what it is, what we do and what to expect next. Job’s not finished. Vertical.

Christine Lagarde personally called the Greek Prime Minister to block Binance's MiCA license! Greek regulators had signaled their approval. Binance was preparing an official visit to Athens. Then overnight, the HCMC told Binance that "Christine Lagarde was against it." This is shameful. It's the exact opposite of what regulation is supposed to be! MiCA was sold as the framework that would clarify the rules of the game and let serious players operate legally in Europe. It was supposed to be transparent, predictable, and applied uniformly. What happened in Greece is the opposite: direct political pressure, applied outside any formal process, to block a company that was following exactly the path it was told to follow. If we want real crypto regulation in Europe, the effort has to come from both sides. The crypto industry (us) has to play by the rules: comply, be transparent, build within the lines. But regulators have to play by the rules too: enforce them fairly, without political interference, without favoring competing agendas like the digital euro.

Millions of traders will be able to short EUR/USD at 3am with a $200 account. And 90% of them will lose. 100x leverage isn't capital. It's debt disguised as opportunity. It's dopamine on steroids that turns into losses. A prop firm gives you real capital with real risk management rules.

Most people have already satisfied most of the five levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and a large portion of them are going to have their jobs replaced by AI. To escape the dull and repetitive grind of everyday life, the simplest and most dopamine-rich path might just be: gambling. Could we be heading toward a gambling supercycle?