Key terms, as the firm still publishes them

These figures are taken from the live KortanaFX homepage and its General Terms and Conditions, both checked on 10 August 2026. They describe a product that cannot currently be bought or traded.

• Challenge fee: $147 for the entry tier shown on the pricing table, account sizes advertised from 5K to 200K.
• Profit target: 8% in phase one, 5% in phase two, none in the funded stage.
• Max daily loss: 5% at every stage.
• Max overall loss: 10% at every stage.
• Profit split: advertised “up to 100%”, with a “Kortana Prime” tier unlocked after four successful withdrawals.
• Payout frequency: advertised as seven days.
• Minimum trading days: none — clause 6.2.1 requires only that the customer “has opened at least one demotrade”.
• Capital cap: USD 200,000 total allocation per customer, “subject to change” (clause 6.6.3).
• Governing law: United Arab Emirates (clause 16.1). No regulator is named anywhere on the site.

The notice, and how old it actually is

The banner at the top of kortanafx.com reads, verbatim and with the firm’s own typos: “ANNOUNCEMENT: We have temporarily paused operations due to losing our MT5 license, we are currently exploring solutions. Mean while all operations are paused untill further notice.”

The word doing the work there is “temporarily”. The HTTP last-modified header on that page returns 13 January 2026, so the current build of the notice is at minimum seven months old. The underlying stoppage is far older. KortanaFX’s Telegram channel, which has 13,300 subscribers, stopped posting on 22 July 2024 and has not posted since. That is more than two years of silence behind a notice that still describes the situation as temporary.

The final post is worth quoting in full, because it is the last thing the firm told its customers:

“We have begun working to find a solution, and within the next 4-8 weeks we plan to transition to a fully new trading platform, dashboard and fully backed by a regulated broker with new management. Once the migration is complete, all trading will resume… Please note payouts will not be processed during this time, all eligible payouts will continue to be sent out once the transition is complete.”

— KortanaFX official Telegram channel, 22 July 2024

Those four-to-eight weeks expired in September 2024. Payouts were suspended in that same sentence and no public update has followed.

It was never a broker, and never held the licence

The most useful thing about KortanaFX is what its own archive reveals about its plumbing, because it settles the question this series keeps returning to: whose licence is it?

KortanaFX was not a broker. Clause 18.1.11 of the GTC defines the “Trading Platform” as “an electronic interface provided by a third party”, and clause 2.12 warns customers that platform operators “are persons or entities different from the Provider”. The firm’s own Telegram archive names the chain. On 15 May 2024 it announced that “our previous provider, Taurex, has decided to part ways with us”, costing it MT4. On 23 May 2024 it said it had migrated “over 24,000 active trading accounts” to a replacement. On 13 July 2024 it disclosed that “MetaQuotes has suspended the MT5 license of our partner Broker Esro”. Nine days later the servers went dark.

So the banner’s phrasing — “losing our MT5 license” — is not quite accurate. KortanaFX never had one. It rented execution through a broker that held one, and when the vendor withdrew that broker’s licence, the prop firm had no fallback. Taurex remains a live, FCA-authorised business today. Esro’s domain no longer resolves in DNS at all.

This is the generalisable lesson. Trading rules are what traders compare; the platform licence is what determines whether a firm exists next month. MetaQuotes began revoking MT4 and MT5 licences from prop firms in February 2024 over grey-label reselling and US regulatory exposure, and the casualty list runs past 80 firms — tracked by Finance Magnates in its running prop-firm status log. The survivors either owned the relationship or moved fast to cTrader, DXtrade, Match-Trader or TradeLocker.

Where the licence sits: three firms compared

	KortanaFX	FTMO	Topstep
Execution relationship	Rented via third-party broker (Taurex, then Esro)	Owns OANDA outright, acquisition closed 1 Dec 2025	In-house sim, live capital at the funded stage
Regulated entity in the group	None named	OANDA, regulated across five jurisdictions	Topstep LLC, CFTC/NFA-adjacent futures rails
Named payout counterparty	Unnamed “third-party company” (clause 7)	FTMO group entity	Topstep
Advertised profit split	Up to 100%	80–90%	100% of first $10,000, then 90%
Status, 10 Aug 2026	Paused, no trading, no payouts	Operating	Operating

Our FTMO review and Topstep funded account review set out those two structures in detail.

Payouts: what is published, and what cannot be verified

KortanaFX’s live homepage still advertises “$10M+ Paid Out To Traders”, “72,000 Traders Trust Us” and “7 Day Withdrawals”. None of those figures is auditable. The firm has never published payout data, a ledger, or an independent attestation, and there is no regulator to file one with.

What can be verified is that payouts were suspended by the firm’s own announcement on 22 July 2024 and have not been publicly resumed. Trader sentiment on KortanaFX’s Trustpilot profile — which runs to dozens of pages — is dominated by payout denials, with recurring accounts of requests rejected on rule-violation grounds the trader disputes, withdrawals left pending for weeks, and support going unanswered. Several reviewers also report finding nothing at the Dubai address.

We could not verify the following, and state that plainly: the total owed to traders at the point of suspension; whether any funded trader has been paid since July 2024; whether fees for evaluations that never completed were refunded; and whether the “third-party company” that clause 7 makes responsible for payouts still exists.

The rules that would have failed traders anyway

Even setting the shutdown aside, the contract has three mechanics worth recording, because they recur across the sector.

The pass conditions are not in the contract. Clause 6.2 lists exactly two requirements to pass the challenge: open at least one demo trade, and never breach the daily loss percentage. There is no profit target and no maximum overall loss anywhere in the binding document — the 8%, 5% and 10% figures live only on a marketing page that clause 2.9 lets the firm “unilaterally change… at any time, including the parameters for their successful completion.”

The contract cannot define a day. The daily loss limit is the only hard fail condition the GTC actually states, and clause 18.2.1 defines its measurement window as “the period from midnight to midnight of the time currently valid in the United States (Eastern European Summer Time, EST)”. That is three mutually exclusive time zones in a single parenthesis, governing the one rule that can end an evaluation.

The marketing contradicts clause 5.4. KortanaFX brands itself “the leader in HFT friendly simulated funding challenges” and invites traders to “use High Frequency Trading EA’s to pass your evaluation challenge”. Clause 5.4.1(e) of the same site’s terms prohibits using “any software, artificial intelligence, ultra-high speed, or mass data entry which might manipulate, abuse, or give you an unfair advantage” — and clause 5.5 lets the firm delete the offending trades, void the account, and terminate without refund. The product that was sold and the conduct the contract forbids are the same activity.

Regulatory posture and what recourse exists

The homepage footer names the operator as “KortanaFX F.Z.C.”, registered at “Office 906 Al Serkal Building 2 Port Saeed Dubai UAE”. The site’s own contact page gives a different suite at the same building — “Office Suite #903, Al Serkal 2, Port Saeed, Deira Dubai” — and the terms name only “Kortana a UAE company”. No regulator, licence number or register entry appears anywhere.

Two further details matter. Port Saeed in Deira is mainland Dubai, not a free zone, which sits oddly with an F.Z.C. suffix. And the terms’ own disclaimer states that Kortana “does not provide any of the investment services listed in the Capital Market Undertakings Act No. 256/2004 Coll.” — the Czech Republic’s capital markets statute — inside a document whose governing-law clause names the UAE. That is a template lifted from a European prop firm and never localised. The GTC’s stated publication date is 4 September 2023 and it has not been revised since.

Recourse is correspondingly thin. Clause 9.2 caps the firm’s liability at the fee the customer paid. Clause 12.1 grants a 14-day consumer withdrawal right that is forfeited the moment the customer places a first demo trade. Clause 2.7 lets the firm terminate a customer who initiates a chargeback. Disputes go to a UAE court at the provider’s registered office. Traders weighing similar offshore structures should read our guide to which offshore licensing regimes are real and which are paper, and our breakdown of what an FX licence actually buys.

The detail that tells you it is over

KortanaFX’s footer carries five links. On 10 August 2026 we requested every one of them. “Contact Us” returns HTTP 404. “Partners Program” returns HTTP 500. The “Rules” and “FAQ” links, which point to an external help centre, return 404. The “Dashboard” button has an empty href, and “Old Dashboard” loads a blank application shell. “Refund Policy” returns an HTTP 301 redirect to an unrelated Indonesian online-slots website; that page’s last-modified header reads 8 August 2026, two days before we checked.

Only two pages still resolve: Terms and Privacy Policy. Every page a stranded customer would need — support, rules, refunds — is dead or hijacked. The two documents that survive are the two that limit the firm’s liability. For comparison of how a functioning firm’s disclosure holds up under the same test, see our Quant Tekel review and our Audacity Capital review.

FAQ

Is KortanaFX still trading?
No. The homepage has carried a “paused operations” notice since at least January 2026, and the firm’s last public communication of any kind was on 22 July 2024. Challenges cannot be purchased and no dashboard loads.

Why did KortanaFX lose MetaTrader 5?
It never held the licence. Its partner broker, Esro, had its MT5 licence suspended by MetaQuotes in July 2024 as part of the vendor’s wider withdrawal of platform access from prop firms. KortanaFX’s execution stopped with it, and its earlier provider, Taurex, had already exited two months before.

Can traders recover challenge fees or unpaid payouts?
Nothing in the public record suggests a process exists. Payouts were suspended by announcement in July 2024, the support and refund pages no longer work, liability is contractually capped at the fee paid, and disputes are directed to a UAE court.

Was KortanaFX regulated?
No regulator is named on the website or in the terms, and no licence number or register entry is cited. All accounts were explicitly simulated; the site states “all funds are simulated trading funds, and all profits are simulated profits”.

What should traders check before paying any prop firm?
Ask whose platform licence it is and whether the firm holds it directly or rents it through an intermediary. Then read the pass conditions in the contract rather than the pricing table, and confirm the terms name the entity that will actually pay you.

This review is independent editorial analysis and is not financial, investment, or trading advice, and is not an endorsement or solicitation. The Industry Spread has no affiliate or referral relationship with the firms covered. Proprietary trading challenges carry a fee that is generally non-refundable, most participants do not reach a funded account, and funded capital is the firm’s capital, not the trader’s. Terms change frequently — always verify current rules directly with the firm before paying any fee.