A funded crypto account is a trading account where the capital belongs to a proprietary trading firm and the decisions belong to you. You pay a one-time fee, prove you can trade within published risk rules — or start funded from day one — and when the account makes money, you keep the majority of the profit. You are never depositing trading capital of your own, and you can never lose more than the fee you paid.
That is the promise. Here is how it actually works, stated the way we wish every firm stated it.
What "funded" really means
At Drift Fund — and at every honest prop firm — evaluations and funded accounts run in a simulated environment using virtual funds. Prices are real, execution is real-time, the rules are enforced by software in milliseconds, but no client money is pooled and nothing you "deposit" is being traded, because you never deposit anything beyond the fee. What is real is the other side: the profit split on a funded account is a performance-based reward paid from the company's own capital, and every payout we have ever made carries a public blockchain transaction hash you can verify yourself.
A firm that pretends the account is a live brokerage balance is hiding something. A firm that states the simulation plainly and then pays verifiably has nothing to hide. That distinction is most of what separates the firms that last from the firms that vanish.
The three ways to get one
- 1-Step challenge — one evaluation phase: reach a 10% profit target inside the risk rules and the account converts to funded. Fastest route, and the drawdown floor trails your high-water mark, which is the price of the speed.
- 2-Step challenge — two phases with a 10% target each, a fixed (non-trailing) floor, and a lower fee. Slower, more forgiving.
- Instant Funded — no evaluation at all: you start on a funded account from day one. It costs more up front because the firm takes the full risk immediately.
Account sizes run from $10K to $300K. The fee is paid once — there is no subscription and no hidden top-up.
What you trade on it
One balance, every market: crypto (including real spot, with no leverage and no liquidations), gold and silver, and the major forex pairs — in the browser on our own terminal, or on MetaTrader 5 if you prefer the desktop standard. You choose the platform when you start; the rules are identical on both.
The rules that keep the account alive
Every rule is published before you pay, and each one exists for a reason a risk desk would recognize:
- Daily drawdown (4%) — your equity may not fall more than 4% below the balance the day started with. It caps how much one bad day can take.
- Maximum drawdown (6%) — a floor 6% below your starting balance (trailing from the high-water mark on 1-Step). It defines the firm's total risk on your account.
- Stop-loss within 5 minutes — every position needs a stop within five minutes of opening. Unprotected positions are how accounts die suddenly; the rule makes protection a habit, not a mood.
- The news window (±5 minutes) — no position may be open from five minutes before to five minutes after a high-impact release, and holding into the window counts. Spreads and slippage around those releases make fills a lottery; the rule takes the lottery out. It is also the most misunderstood rule in prop trading — here is exactly how it works.
- Risk per asset (2%) — combined open loss on one instrument may not exceed 2% of equity, which is simply position sizing enforced in software.
Break a rule and the account closes — that is what the fee bought: a hard cap on what a bad stretch can cost you. The full list, with exact numbers, is at driftfund.io/rules.
How payouts work
Once a funded account is at least 3% in profit, is 14 days old, has 5 distinct trading days, and no single day makes up more than 40% of its winning-day profits (a consistency check that filters out one lucky trade), you can request a withdrawal. Identity verification is required once. You keep 90% of the profit, paid in USDT or USDC to a wallet you control — most requests settle the same day, and every payment is verifiable on-chain.
Honesty requires the other half of that paragraph: most participants never reach a payout. Trading is hard, and the majority of evaluations end on a rule breach, not at the profit target. What a serious firm promises is not that you will get paid — it is that when you earn it, the payment arrives, and you can verify it did.
How to judge any funded-account offer
Run the same four checks on us that you should run on anyone:
- Are the rules published in full before you pay? If a rule can surprise you after purchase, that is the business model.
- Is the simulated environment stated plainly? Vagueness there predicts vagueness at payout time.
- Can payouts be verified independently? On-chain hashes cannot be photoshopped; screenshots can.
- Does the firm say what most outcomes look like? Any firm implying that typical participants profit is selling a lottery ticket with extra steps.
The long version of that checklist — with the questions to ask before paying any firm, including us — is in our guide: How crypto prop firms really work.
Start whenever you are ready, with the rules already on the table: driftfund.io.