Ask a prop firm how good a trader is and you will usually get an answer in dollars. Profit made, drawdown avoided, balance grown. Pipcy, a prop trading company active in 47 countries, thinks that answer measures the wrong thing, and it has built the industry’s first challenge that grades traders on skill alone.
The firm’s Pips Mastery Challenge scores traders in net pips instead of account profit. Lot sizes are fixed. Leverage cannot be pushed. A trader on a $2,500 account and a trader on a $100,000 account face the same 500-pip target with the same 250-pip loss limit. Whoever executes better, wins. Nothing else counts.
Dollars Hide the Trader. Pips Reveal Them.
Dollar-based results carry noise. A big win can come from a big position rather than a good read. A strong month can hide three weeks of poor decisions rescued by one lucky trade. Balance charts tell you what happened to the money. They say much less about the person trading it.
Pips carry no such cover. A trader who finishes the month 400 pips up made good calls, managed exits and kept losses contained. There is no position size to inflate the result and no leverage to flatter it. That is the logic behind what Pipcy calls its skill-first model: fix every variable except decision-making, then grade the decisions.
Every trader believes they have an edge. Five hundred pips is how the program finds out, because over that distance luck runs out and only the trader remains. The format comes from founder and CEO Omer Ben Matityahu, a fintech entrepreneur with years of hands-on experience in the proprietary trading world, who built Pipcy’s gamified platform from the ground up around one conviction: a balance chart can flatter a lucky oversized trade until it looks like skill, but a pip count cannot.
The Rules, in Brief
Pips Mastery runs in two versions. Mastery X2 sets a 500-pip target. Mastery X3 raises it to 750 pips and drops the entry fee, which starts at $18. Both allow a maximum loss of 250 pips, require three trading days at minimum, and place no daily drawdown limit on the account. News trading is allowed.
Each account trades a fixed lot matched to its balance, from 0.05 lots at $2,500 up to 2 lots at $100,000. The challenge covers forex pairs only and runs on MetaTrader 5, with full charting, 21 timeframes and depth of market across desktop and mobile.
Traders who pass move into a funded progression. Lot sizes scale with proven consistency up to 16 lots, earnings reach up to $400 per pip at the top levels, profit splits go up to 95 percent, and payouts are processed within 48 hours of request.
Built for the Trader Who Was Always Overlooked
The skill-first format changes who gets a fair shot. Under dollar-based rules, small-account traders operate at a built-in disadvantage. Their wins look minor, their fees buy less room for error, and scaling feels distant. Under pip-based rules, the size of the wallet stops mattering on day one of the challenge.
That opens the door for a group the industry has largely priced out or graded unfairly: skilled traders without capital. A student in Manila, a part-time trader in Lagos or a careful scalper in São Paulo competes on identical terms with anyone else in the program. The $18 entry point, well below the $32 to $165 range typical of entry-level challenges elsewhere, lowers the barrier further.
Few people at the firm know this problem better than Vladimir Rybakov, Head of Pipcy Academy. A CFTe-certified financial technician with 19 years in the markets, Rybakov has taught thousands of traders through his own HomeTraderClub community and as an award-winning educator at global trading events. The lesson that experience teaches is blunt: talent is spread evenly around the world, capital is not. A pip-based challenge is the first evaluation format that separates those two things properly, and the best trader Pipcy ever funds may well be someone who could never have afforded a $500 evaluation.
Discipline by Design
There is a second effect of fixed lots that traders notice within days: the usual ways to self-destruct stop working. Doubling down after a loss is impossible. Oversizing a “sure thing” is impossible. The revenge trade, responsible for more failed evaluations than any market move, has no fuel.
What remains is the slow, repeatable work that professional trading actually consists of. Pick the setup, take the entry, protect the stop, bank the pips. Traders progress the same way they would on an institutional desk, where size is granted with proven consistency rather than claimed in a moment of confidence.
Pipcy supports that process with free education through Pipcy Academy, covering price action, risk management and market behavior, plus a blog and weekly video hub. Newer traders who want a grounding in the basics can start with the firm’s plain-language guide to what is a prop firm before choosing a challenge.
The Numbers So Far
Pipcy currently serves more than 1,264 active traders in 47 countries and has paid over $5.3 million in total rewards, with support available around the clock. Coverage of the firm has appeared in Finance Magnates, FXEmpire, Benzinga and StreetInsider.
The company runs on technology it built itself, from the trading platform to the CRM and trader dashboard. Its founding team, traders and fintech entrepreneurs with over 15 years across forex, stocks and options, includes industry names such as Snir Achiel, co-founder of The5ers, who leads risk management and consulting.
For traders who prefer the classic format, Pipcy also offers its percentage-based Classic Challenge in one-step and two-step versions, with a 12 percent maximum loss, no daily drawdown and scaling up to $3,000,000. The two programs give traders a choice the industry has never offered before: be measured in dollars, or be measured in skill.
Where It Goes From Here
Pipcy expects the skill-first idea to spread beyond its own platform, and the firm says it welcomes that. If other firms copy pip-based challenges, traders win, and the record will still show who built it first. The goal was never to own a gimmick. It was to change what the industry rewards: skill over size, pips over profits.
The Pips Mastery Challenge is available now in both variants at pipcy.com/challenges/pips-mastery.
About Pipcy
Pipcy is a proprietary trading challenge platform created by traders and industry professionals. The firm offers the industry-first pip-based Pips Mastery Challenge and the percentage-based Pipcy Classic Challenge, supported by free education through Pipcy Academy, in-house technology, and performance splits of up to 95 percent. Learn more at https://pipcy.com.
Disclaimer:
This article is published for informational purposes only. While every effort has been made to present the information accurately, readers should independently verify any claims, features, or performance figures before relying on them. Any trading or investment activity involves risk, and readers are advised to seek independent financial advice where appropriate.
