Why we built TradoPay.

Every product gets explained two ways. There’s the version on the homepage — the polished one, with the right verbs and a clean diagram. And there’s the version you tell over a coffee, when someone asks how the thing actually started.

This is the second version.

The view from inside the back office

For the last few years, the team behind TradoPay has been running YourPropFirm — the back-office platform that hundreds of prop firms use to handle traders, evaluations, funding, and payouts. That position gave us a view of the prop trading industry that almost no one else has.

We weren’t reading about the problems in industry forums. We were watching them happen, in real time, across hundreds of firms, every week.

Two of those problems kept reappearing. Both were about money — specifically about how it moves into and out of a prop firm. After three years of recommending workarounds, watching firms cycle through processors, and helping clients clean up the wreckage when their payments stack collapsed, we eventually accepted that the workarounds weren’t going to be enough. The problems were structural. They needed an actual product, not better advice.

That product is TradoPay.

Problem one: the pay-in side

The first problem we kept seeing was the one most firms encounter first. They couldn’t get a payment processor.

A new prop firm would launch, sign up with one of the big-name processors, run for a few weeks, and then get a closure email. Or they wouldn’t get approved at all. Or they’d get approved with rates so high and reserves so heavy that the unit economics didn’t survive contact with reality.

We watched founders do all the obvious things. Apply to a different processor. Get a different lawyer to write the underwriting application differently. Set up a second entity in a different jurisdiction. Some of these worked for a quarter or two. None of them solved the underlying issue, which is that generic processors are built for businesses that look nothing like a prop firm. Card networks were tightening their books on consumer-facing financial products. Acquirers were tightening their lists. Processors were updating their prohibited businesses pages — which by 2025 were starting to name prop trading explicitly.

The firms that survived this environment had two things in common. They had enough volume to absorb high-risk pricing. And they had operational maturity — multiple PSPs running in parallel, clean reconciliation, the ability to switch processors quickly when one of them closed an account.

The firms that struggled were the smaller and newer ones, who needed exactly the support that the market was structurally not going to give them. They had no leverage on rates. They got rejected from the better processors. They ended up with the predatory ones, paying 6% and waiting 90 days for settlements while their cash flow strangled the business.

We had tools we could give them on the operations side — better dashboards, faster reconciliation, cleaner trader records. We didn’t have a tool we could give them for the part that actually mattered, which was getting paid in the first place.

Problem two: the pay-out side

The second problem was less obvious and, in some ways, more damaging.

Pay-outs in prop trading are an unusual operational beast. Money is going from a firm to retail traders, often across borders, often in crypto, often in significant amounts. Every payout is a moment when the trader judges whether the firm is real. Every payout is also a moment when somebody on the firm’s operations team has to decide whether to send tens of thousands of dollars based on internal records that, in many cases, weren’t designed for this level of scrutiny.

The visible failure mode of this was the trust problem. A trader takes a $20,000 payout, the wire takes four days, the trader thinks the firm is stalling, posts on Twitter that they haven’t been paid, and an entirely solvent firm finds itself in a public credibility crisis. Or a payout actually gets stuck — wrong account number, KYC mismatch, partner bank holiday — and the firm spends three days dealing with a situation that genuinely is their problem, but for which they have no real toolkit.

The invisible failure mode was worse. Some of the payouts going out were going to people who shouldn’t have been receiving them. Multi-account abuse. Payouts to the same wallet across different trader names. Payouts to wallets we’d seen flagged on other firms’ systems. Each individual case was small. The aggregate, across the industry, was in the millions of dollars per year, quietly leaking from prop firms to operators who’d figured out how to game evaluation systems at scale.

Both failure modes — the trust crisis and the leakage — came down to the same root cause. The pay-out moment was treated as a transaction, not as a verifiable event. The firm sent money. The trader received money (or didn’t). There was no shared, durable, public record of what had happened that either side could point to.

What we considered, and didn’t do

When we accepted that this needed a product, we spent a long time considering what not to build.

We considered staying out of payments entirely and just recommending partner PSPs to our YourPropFirm clients. We’d been doing this informally for years. The problem is that the recommendations couldn’t keep up with how fast the market was changing. A processor that was good for prop firms in March was closing accounts by July. We were essentially running a real-time recommendation engine on top of an unstable underlying market, and the recommendations weren’t aging well.

We considered building a marketplace — a platform that would shop your application across multiple processors and surface the best offer. That would have been useful, but it doesn’t solve the structural issue. You still have a one-to-one relationship with whichever processor accepts you. When they tighten their policies six months later, you’re back where you started.

We considered acquiring or partnering with an existing high-risk processor. The economics didn’t work — most of the firms in that segment are built around extraction from clients who have no other options, and we weren’t going to put our name on that.

What we eventually concluded was that the right answer was the one with the most operational complexity but the cleanest result for clients. Become a Merchant of Record ourselves. Negotiate aggregated rates with multiple licensed partners. Take on the underwriting and reserve management. Pass the result through to clients as a single integrated relationship, with diversified routing underneath.

That decision is what TradoPay is on the pay-in side. It is structurally different from being a PSP, and it took us most of 2025 to set up.

What we built on the pay-out side

The pay-out side took a different approach.

We weren’t going to fix the trust problem by getting better at sending wires. Wires are wires. We could shave hours off settlement times, but we couldn’t make a $20,000 cross-border transfer feel instantaneous.

What we could do — and what no one was doing — was make the payout itself verifiable. Every payout that goes through TradoPay generates a cryptographic receipt, signed by the licensed partner who actually sent the money, with a hash anchored to a public chain. The trader gets a link. Anyone can verify that the receipt exists, when it was issued, and which partner signed it. The receipt content stays private. The proof of its existence is public.

That single design choice does several things at once. It removes “I haven’t been paid” disputes — there’s a verifiable record. It removes “the firm is stalling” social media incidents — the trader can show a public timestamp. It creates an industry-wide trail that makes multi-firm payout abuse genuinely harder, because the same wallet receiving payouts from five firms in the same week leaves a public footprint.

We deliberately built the verification layer to not depend on trusting us. The disbursing institution signs the receipt, not TradoPay. We anchor it to a public chain we don’t control. The whole point is that an industry built around money movement needs an audit layer that doesn’t sit inside any one firm’s database. The credibility comes from the verification being independent of any of the parties whose interests are at stake.

What we won’t build

A point that matters more for the long run than for the launch.

TradoPay is, deliberately, not a regulated financial institution. We are not a payment institution. We are not an e-money institution. We do not hold customer funds. We do not move money across borders ourselves.

Every regulated leg of every transaction goes through a licensed partner — Wise, Triple-A, Paysafe, Circle, and others depending on the route. Those partners have the licenses, the AML programs, and the regulatory infrastructure to do that work properly. They have spent years building it.

We considered, briefly, applying for our own licenses. We decided against it for two reasons. The first is that we didn’t want to compete with our own partners on the regulated layer — that’s a different business with a different cost structure, and the world doesn’t need another mid-tier payments licensee. The second is that the right place for regulated activity is with regulated specialists. The right place for verification, integration, and prop-firm-specific operational tooling is with us. Mixing the two creates worse outcomes for clients than keeping them clean.

This is a quieter point than the rest of this essay, but it might be the most important one. The architecture is the strategy.

What’s next

The launch surface of TradoPay covers pay-ins via Merchant of Record, pay-outs with cryptographic receipts, and the operational dashboard that ties them together. That is the product, today.

The longer arc is more interesting. As more prop firms route their flows through TradoPay, the data we accumulate on payment-method preferences, regional patterns, and trader behaviour becomes genuinely useful — to the firms running on us, and to the broader Quant Technology Group ecosystem. The verification layer becomes more useful the more firms participate, because trader identity and payout history become portable in a way they haven’t been before. The integration layer becomes deeper as we ship more of it.

But none of that is what we set out to do. What we set out to do was solve the two problems that kept showing up in our customer success calls. A better answer than the workarounds we’d been recommending. A more durable answer than the next processor we’d have helped a client onboard.

If you’re running a prop firm and either of the two problems in this post sounds familiar, I’d genuinely like to talk. Either the pay-in side, or the pay-out side, or both. Tell us about your firm. We’ll come back within one business day with what we can actually do for you.