Funded Trader Founder Shuts Prop Firm for Prediction Markets

Angelo Ciaramello, the founder of The Funded Trader, is closing his futures prop firm Rev One Trading. He plans to redirect his energy toward prediction markets.

Ciaramello announced the closure on August 21. Rev One had already shut down the previous week. The reason was not a lack of traders or weak demand. He said the economics of the technology stack were the problem.

“We built an amazing product alone but did not have a top platform option, which hurt our ability to scale,” Ciaramello wrote. He called it time to “retire from prop firms” and focus on prediction-market products. He did not identify those products, say whether they would be consumer-facing or infrastructure, or provide a launch timetable.

Rev One was Ciaramello's second prop operation, after The Funded Trader, and concentrated on futures. Its model used paid evaluations in simulated accounts. Traders had to meet profit targets without exceeding drawdown rules before becoming eligible for payouts. Rev One's own website said trading occurred in a simulated environment rather than through actual futures transactions on an exchange.

The platform complaint has a specific backdrop. Rev One had been trying to widen its technology choices shortly before closing. Its LinkedIn page said in July that it was adding DeepCharts and ATAS through Volumetrica after traders requested more platform options.

Ciaramello's argument is narrower than saying futures props lack customers. His claim is that without the right front-end and infrastructure, acquisition and trader demand do not necessarily translate into a scalable business.

Technology providers are making the opposite bet. They say infrastructure can make new prop products easier, not harder, to scale.

Trade Tech Solutions now markets prediction-market infrastructure alongside forex, futures, crypto and sports products. It says its systems support more than 500,000 new prop accounts per month. In June, it added Match-Trader Prediction Markets as an integrated product for prop firms, putting event-driven markets inside the same environment used for execution, position monitoring and P&L tracking.

Match-Trade describes its product as white-label infrastructure for brokers, prop firms and financial institutions. It explicitly says it does not itself operate a prediction market or take wagers. Customers using the software are responsible for obtaining whatever authorizations their jurisdictions require.

PropAccount.com has gone further. It added prediction markets as a supported asset class alongside FX, futures, crypto and equities in July, allowing operators to launch event-contract challenges through an existing operational stack.

Ciaramello is not moving toward an empty category. Infrastructure vendors are already building around it.

The often-cited $40 billion figure needs one qualification. It refers to the wider prediction-market industry, not trading generated specifically by prop firms.