Last reviewed 2026-08-16
DecentralProp vs FTMO
FTMO is the reference point for this whole category, and it earned that: a decade of operating, a public payout record, and an evaluation people broadly trust to be graded consistently. Any comparison that opens by implying otherwise is selling something.
The difference worth reading about is structural. At FTMO, and at every firm built on the same model, one company writes the evaluation rules, runs the platform that produces your fills, decides whether you breached, and funds the payout from its own balance sheet. Those four jobs sit inside one entity whose revenue goes up when you fail. Nobody has alleged this is abused at FTMO. The point is that you cannot check it either way, because the record lives in a private database.
This protocol splits those four jobs apart and puts the parts that decide your money on-chain. The evaluation rules are fixed protocol-wide and hash-committed to your account the moment you buy it. Breach detection runs against an hourly settlement record anyone can replay. Payouts settle as Solana transactions with a signature you can open on an explorer. A firm operator here sets its brand and its profit split, and cannot touch the rules or the result.
Solana devnet, in test SOL — read from the settlement record at the last deploy, and every figure resolves to a transaction on the paying firm's page. Mainnet opens September 2026.
Where the two models differ
| Centralized prop firm | DecentralProp protocol | |
|---|---|---|
| Who writes the evaluation rules | The firm. It can publish new terms whenever it likes. | The protocol, identically for every firm: 7% profit target, 10% max drawdown, 5% daily loss, four minimum trading days. An operator cannot change them. |
| Can the rules change after you buy | New terms usually apply to new accounts, but the commitment is a policy, not a mechanism. | No. Terms are hash-committed to your account at purchase. The risk engine can tighten terms for future buyers; an account already trading is never retightened. |
| Who decides you breached | The firm's own system, against its own records. | An hourly settlement record with a published root. Anyone can replay the inputs and check the result, and a wrong one can be disputed on-chain. |
| Where the payout money is | The company's balance sheet. You take its word for the balance. | An on-chain treasury PDA per firm, readable by address, backed by a token reserve, a staked backstop, and a pool every firm pays into. |
| Identity check before payout | Yes. Documents, review, and a queue you cannot see into. | None. The wallet that traded is the wallet that withdraws. |
| Track record | Years of payouts across a large trader base. | Early. The protocol is young and its settled-payout record is small, which is why every one of them is published with its transaction. |
| Support when something goes wrong | A staffed desk, in many languages, with escalation paths. | Thinner. The on-chain dispute path is real, but there is no equivalent of a 24-hour support organisation. |
The conflict of interest, stated precisely
A prop firm on the simulated model makes money two ways: evaluation fees from traders who do not pass, and the spread between what a funded trader earns and what the firm keeps. Both improve when traders fail. That is not an accusation, it is the shape of the business, and it is the same at every firm running this model including this protocol's own engine.
What differs is what sits between the incentive and your account. At a centralized firm, the answer is the firm's own controls and its interest in a good reputation. Here it is a program: the rules the account was sold under are hashed on-chain at purchase, the fills are drawn from a pre-committed price feed, and the settlement record is public. The incentive is unchanged. The ability to act on it is what gets removed.
Where FTMO is genuinely ahead
Scale and history. FTMO has paid a very large number of traders over many years, and a payout record that long is evidence no new protocol can manufacture. If your first question is "has this thing paid thousands of people", the honest answer here is no, not yet.
Breadth of instruments and platform maturity, plus a support organisation that answers in your language at three in the morning. Those are real things to weigh.
The trade is between a long record you cannot audit and a short record you can. Which one is worth more depends on how much you have on the line and how much you trust the audit.
Check the claims on this page
Every statement above about this protocol is checkable without asking us anything. These are the four fastest.
- Read a firm's treasury balanceOpen the firm's page and take the treasury PDA to any Solana explorer. The balance is the balance.
- Open a settled payoutEvery completed payout is published with its transaction signature. Click through to Solscan.
- Replay a settlement hourThe hourly roots and the procedure for recomputing one are documented in full.
- Read the deployed programsThe five Anchor programs are source-verified against the on-chain bytecode.
Questions
- Is DecentralProp a prop firm?
- No. It is the protocol firms run on. Anyone can deploy a firm on it, and each one is a separate brand with its own treasury, token and profit split. What they share is the engine, the evaluation rules and the settlement record.
- Are the evaluation rules easier than FTMO's?
- They are different, and fixed. 7% profit target, 10% maximum drawdown, 5% daily loss, four minimum trading days, the same at every firm on the protocol. No firm can advertise easier terms, and none can quietly impose harder ones.
- Can a firm on this protocol refuse to pay me?
- It cannot hold a completed payout, because delivery is a program instruction rather than a decision. What it can be is short of money, which is why each firm's payout liquidity is readable on-chain before you buy anything, and why the waterfall runs through a token reserve, a staked backstop and a protocol-wide pool behind it.