Why we built a prop firm with physical ATM payments
The thinking behind Coinhub Funded — and what it means to fund challenges in cash at 2,000+ locations.
Every other prop firm in the world is internet-native. We're the only one with 2,000+ physical locations. Here's why that matters.
The problem with internet-only prop firms
The prop firm industry has a reputation problem, and it isn't entirely undeserved. New firms appear, run for 18–24 months, and disappear. Customer funds — what little of them actually existed — vanish along with the websites. Trustpilot fills up with one-star reviews about withdrawals that never arrived.
The structural reason is simple: an online-only business with no physical presence has no public accountability. There's no storefront to picket, no employees to call, no bank branch to walk into. Customers have to trust that the operator behind the domain name will still be there next month.
That worked for a while. But after enough cycles of failed firms, the smart money — and the smart traders — have started asking harder questions about who they're really paying.
Physical infrastructure as a trust anchor
Coinhub Funded is built on top of the Coinhub network — 2,000+ cryptocurrency ATMs across 25+ states, serving 600,000+ active customers, operational since 2018. The ATMs aren't a marketing gimmick. They're a real business that generates real revenue, employs real staff, and answers to real regulators.
When you fund a Coinhub Funded challenge at a Coinhub ATM, you're standing in a physical retail location operated by a company that's been licensed in your state for years. If something goes wrong, there's somewhere to go. If we disappeared tomorrow, those 2,000 kiosks would still be physically standing in convenience stores, gas stations, and pharmacies across the country.
That accountability is built into the business model from the foundation up. We can't be an exit-scam-style operation because we have a physical footprint to maintain.
Cash access opens trading to a wider audience
The other reason for the physical network: not everyone wants to wire money to an offshore payment processor. Not everyone has a credit card that works internationally. Not everyone is comfortable depositing crypto from a self-custody wallet for the first time.
Many of our customers are first-time crypto users. They walked into a Coinhub ATM with $200 in cash and walked out with USDT in a wallet. Now some of those same customers want to trade — and we can let them fund evaluations the exact same way: cash, in person, at a location they've been to before.
This isn't a small consideration. The remittance economy, the unbanked, the cash-preferring — these are large audiences that internet-only firms structurally can't serve. We can.
Why we pay out in USDT
The other end of the payment story is payouts. We pay in USDT, not USD. That's a deliberate choice and worth explaining.
USDT settles in minutes on Tron and BNB Smart Chain, and in hours on Ethereum. No bank intermediary, no wire delays, no "manual review" that mysteriously takes 90 days. The payout is in your wallet before our compliance team has finished its lunch break.
USDT also doesn't care what country you're in. Traders in jurisdictions with restrictive bank wire policies still get paid the same way as traders in the US. That's important for a global product.
The tradeoff: you have to manage a crypto wallet. We provide guidance for new users and support the three biggest stablecoin networks (ERC-20, TRC-20, BEP-20). For most traders the convenience massively outweighs the friction.
What this means for you as a trader
If you're choosing between prop firms, the physical infrastructure question is worth asking. It doesn't guarantee a firm is well-run — but its absence guarantees nothing. A firm with no physical presence has nothing tying it to its commitments.
Coinhub Funded isn't a marketing-led prop firm sitting on top of a thin operations layer. It's a trading product built inside an established financial network with hundreds of thousands of existing customers and a six-year operating history. That's the foundation. Everything else — the evaluation, the rules, the payouts — sits on top of it.
