FundedSeat Shuts Down After Two Years, Citing No Access to NinjaTrader, Tradovate and MetaTrader
FundedSeat has told its traders it is shutting down, two years after three brothers from Amsterdam launched the futures prop firm and built it up to roughly $700,000 in payouts a month. The announcement went out on Monday 28 September 2026 and was signed by the company’s COO, Floba. The reason given was not fraud, not a blown risk book and not a regulator: the firm said it could never secure access to the trading platforms its target traders actually wanted to use. For funded traders, this is the clearest recent example of a risk that rarely appears on a comparison table, namely that a firm’s survival can hinge on a licensing decision made by a software vendor it does not control.
What FundedSeat Told Its Traders
The closure notice was posted publicly rather than sent quietly to a subset of account holders, which is worth noting in an industry where wind-downs have often been handled badly. FundedSeat framed the decision as a growth problem rather than a solvency problem. After two years, the company said, it had become clear that without access to the platforms in question it would never reach the “growth velocity” it needed. That is an unusual admission. Most prop firm closures are explained away with vague references to market conditions or a strategic review, and traders are left guessing whether their balances are safe.
The firm operated in the futures segment with daily payout plans, a model that attracts active intraday traders who want cash out quickly rather than a monthly cycle. Roughly $700,000 a month in payouts is not a trivial operation. It places FundedSeat well above the hobbyist tier and into the range where a firm has real infrastructure, real support costs and real cash flow. That a business at that scale still concluded it had no path forward says something about how narrow the margins are in futures prop trading once you strip out platform choice.
The Platform Problem That Closed the Door
FundedSeat said it could not offer NinjaTrader or Tradovate, the two platforms that dominate the retail futures prop market in the United States, and that it could not offer MetaTrader either because of developer licensing restrictions applied to proprietary trading firms.
That last point is the important one. MetaQuotes moved against US-facing prop firms on MT4 and MT5 in early 2024, and the restriction has never been rolled back in any broad way. FTMO is the notable firm still able to offer MT5 to US traders. Spotware, which develops cTrader, tightened onboarding for US traders in the first quarter of 2026, reported at the time by Finance Magnates. Put those together and a new futures firm targeting US traders is left with a shrinking set of options, most of which require either a commercial relationship the vendor is not willing to grant or a proprietary platform build that costs money the firm does not have yet.
This is a structural constraint, not bad luck. A prop firm does not own its distribution rails. It rents them. When the landlord changes the terms, a firm with no alternative has no business. Traders comparing futures firms should be asking which platforms a firm offers and, more usefully, whether the firm owns that access or depends on a third party that could withdraw it. Our breakdown of how futures prop firms operate covers why platform access sits at the centre of that model.
What Happens to Accounts, Payouts and Refunds
FundedSeat said all active accounts will be refunded, that pending withdrawals and positive live account balances will be disbursed, and that support stays available through live chat and email during the wind-down. The firm did not publish a timetable for those refunds in the announcement, and traders should treat the absence of a date as a detail worth chasing rather than assuming it is immediate.
That matters because the pattern in previous closures has not been consistent. Some firms have paid out in full and on schedule. Others have gone quiet, moved goalposts, or processed a first tranche and then stopped. Until FundedSeat’s refunds actually land in trader accounts, the commitment is a stated intention rather than a completed fact. Anyone holding a balance should take screenshots of account statements, pending withdrawal requests and the closure notice itself before access is switched off. If you are evaluating firms partly on how they behave under stress, our prop firm survival rates analysis sets out what the historical record looks like.
Why a Firm Paying $700,000 a Month Still Could Not Continue
The instinct is to assume that a firm paying out that much is either very successful or paying out too much. Neither is necessarily true. Payout volume is a function of how many funded accounts a firm carries and how generous its terms are, not a measure of profit. A futures firm running daily payouts on a large funded base can move a lot of money while still losing ground on customer acquisition, platform fees, support headcount and reset revenue that fails to grow.
What FundedSeat appears to be describing is a ceiling rather than a collapse. The firm could operate, but it could not grow, because the traders it needed to attract were on platforms it could not reach. In a market where the biggest firms compete on price and feature parity, a firm that cannot offer the standard platform is competing with one hand tied. Established names such as Topstep and My Funded Futures built their positions partly on platform breadth, and a newcomer without it is selling into a headwind that discounting cannot fix.
It is also worth being precise about what is not known. FundedSeat has not published financials, has not disclosed the size of its funded book, and has not said whether any platform vendor formally refused it or simply never engaged. Those are meaningful gaps, and until the firm addresses them the platform explanation should be read as the company’s own account of events rather than an independently verified cause.
What This Means for the Broader Prop Industry
The FundedSeat closure fits a pattern that has been building since 2024. Platform vendors have become gatekeepers, and their licensing decisions now shape which prop firms can exist and in which markets. That is a quiet but significant transfer of power away from the firms and toward MetaQuotes, Spotware, NinjaTrader and Tradovate. Firms that own their technology, or that have a broker parent supplying it, are structurally safer than firms renting access on terms that can change.
For traders, the practical takeaway is that platform access belongs on the due diligence checklist alongside profit split, drawdown rules and payout history. A firm with excellent terms on a platform it may lose is a worse bet than a firm with average terms on a platform it controls. It is also a reminder to keep capital spread across more than one firm, and to withdraw earned profit rather than compounding it inside an account you do not own.
The wider futures prop market is not shrinking, but it is consolidating around firms with secure platform relationships. Expect more closures among the smaller US-facing futures firms that launched into the post-2024 licensing environment without solving distribution first. If you are choosing between segments, our comparison of futures and forex prop firms explains where the payout and rule differences actually sit.
Read Our Prop Firm Survival Rates Report →
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