Proprietary trading firm Pipcy has launched what it describes as the industry's first pip-based trader evaluation, departing from the dollar-denominated model that has dominated online prop firm challenges since their inception.

The new Pips Mastery Challenge grades participants on net pips earned rather than account growth in dollars, a design that removes position sizing from the evaluation equation. Under this framework, a trader using a $2,500 account and one using a $100,000 account face identical grading scales.

Pipcy, which serves traders across 47 countries, was founded by fintech entrepreneur Omer Ben Matityahu, whose background includes years of direct experience in proprietary trading. The company's premise is straightforward: account size has historically distorted how the industry assesses trading talent, and evaluating performance in pips eliminates that variable.

The launch comes amid rapid expansion in the online prop trading sector, which has grown from a niche segment to a global industry since the late 2010s. Major firms such as FTMO and The Funded Trader have reported processing hundreds of thousands of challenge registrations, drawing retail traders who seek access to larger capital pools without risking personal funds beyond entry fees.

The Dollar-Based Model and Its Limitations

Since online prop firms emerged, evaluations have largely followed a standard template. Traders pay an entry fee, receive a simulated account, and must grow the balance by 8 to 10 percent without exceeding drawdown thresholds expressed in dollars or percentages.

While equitable in theory, this approach often conflates skill with risk appetite. Two traders executing identical strategies with the same entries and exits can produce vastly different outcomes solely because one used larger position sizes. A disciplined trader banking 300 pips on conservative positions can fail, while a trader who takes oversized positions and gets favorable results can pass.

Over-leveraging is consistently cited as a leading cause of challenge failures across industry studies. Pipcy's solution was not to add another risk management rule, but to embed risk controls directly into the evaluation's structure.

How the Pips Mastery Challenge Works

Each account is assigned a fixed lot size corresponding to its balance, ranging from 0.05 lots on a $2,500 account to 2 lots on a $100,000 account. With position sizing predetermined, net pips serve as what Pipcy describes as a clean measure of timing, direction, and discipline.

Two challenge variants are available. Mastery X2 requires 500 net pips to pass. Mastery X3 sets a 750-pip target and offers a lower entry fee starting at $18. By comparison, competing entry-level challenges typically range from $32 to $165.

Both variants operate under the same core parameters: a maximum loss of 250 pips, a minimum of three trading days, and no daily drawdown limit. A single volatile session cannot eliminate a participant provided the account remains within its overall loss cap. News trading, which many established firms restrict or prohibit entirely, is permitted.

The challenge is limited to forex and runs on MetaTrader 5, which offers 21 timeframes, full charting capabilities, and depth-of-market features on both desktop and mobile platforms. Pipcy states that restricting the evaluation to a single asset class maintains consistency in how pips are measured across all account sizes.

Compensation and Progression

Passing the challenge represents the first stage of Pipcy's funded trader model. Successful participants scale into lot sizes of up to 16 lots as they advance through funded tiers, with earning potential reaching up to $400 per pip at the highest levels. Profit splits go up to 95 percent, and payout requests are processed within 48 hours.

The staged fixed-lot progression mirrors how institutional trading desks allocate capital, where new traders are not given maximum sizing on day one and cannot unilaterally increase their limits.

This structure reflects the influence of Snir Achiel, who leads Risk Management and Consulting at Pipcy. Achiel brings over 15 years of experience across forex, stocks, and options markets and co-founded The5ers, an established name in the prop trading sector. His areas of expertise, risk management and the supply and demand method, are embedded throughout the program's design.

From a behavioral standpoint, the fixed-lot format also curbs revenge trading. Because participants cannot increase position sizes to recover losses quickly, attention shifts from dollar targets to pip accumulation.

Educational Components

Pipcy complements the challenge with free training through Pipcy Academy, headed by Vladimir Rybakov. Rybakov is a CFTe-certified financial technician with 19 years of market experience, founder of HomeTraderClub, and an award-winning educator. The curriculum covers price action, risk management, and market behavior, the same competencies the pip-based evaluation assesses.

The firm additionally maintains an educational blog, a video hub with weekly forecasts, and community channels on Discord, Telegram, and YouTube.

Operational Scale and Infrastructure

Pipcy reports more than 1,264 active traders across 47 countries and over $5.3 million paid out in rewards. The company provides round-the-clock live support and has received coverage in Finance Magnates, FXEmpire, Benzinga, and StreetInsider.

Unlike most challenge providers that rely on licensed third-party technology, Pipcy constructed its own infrastructure encompassing its trading platform, CRM system, and trader dashboard. The company attributes its 48-hour payout processing and rapid feature updates to this in-house approach.

The Pips Mastery Challenge operates alongside the percentage-based Pipcy Classic Challenge, which features a 12 percent maximum loss allowance, no daily drawdown limit, one-step and two-step formats, and scaling capacity up to $3,000,000.

Both variants of the Pips Mastery Challenge are currently available at pipcy.com/challenges/pips-mastery.