What’s Driving Trading Platform Market in 2026: From Match-Trader Innovations to Prediction Markets

With 2025 marking a pivotal year for trading platforms, we caught up with Michał Karczewski, CEO of Match-Trade Technologies, ahead of iFX EXPO Dubai 2026 to take stock of the evolving landscape. In this discussion, he explores how the Match-Trader platform grew despite MetaQuotes’ changing strategy, why mobile-first design is becoming non-negotiable, and what the company’s bet on prediction markets says about where the industry might be headed.

Let’s start with 2025. How would you assess the year for Match-Trader? Are you satisfied with how things turned out?

2025 was definitely successful for us. Looking at the numbers, it’s clear we delivered on the targets we’d set out to achieve. Over the year, we managed to onboard over 160 brokers and prop firms who decided to add Match-Trader to their offering, and 1.8M traders registered accounts on our platform. These figures show that Match-Trader has established itself as a solid alternative to MetaTrader, despite its dominance in the market.

Staying with MetaTrader for a moment – MetaQuotes resumed selling its platform to prop firms in 2025. How did that affect your business?

Well, platforms like ours, cTrader, or DXtrade clearly benefited when MQ wasn’t accepting prop firms for some time. When they started working with props again, we definitely felt it because some of those firms brought MT5 back into their offering – this meant fewer challenges being run on alternative platforms. Thankfully, the drop wasn’t dramatic, and combined with new clients coming on board, we were still able to significantly increase Match-Trader revenues.

What’s also worth noting is that Match-Trade Technologies continues to offer and roll out new solutions for MetaTrader. We’ve kept our CRM for brokers and a bridge in the offering, and recently expanded our prop CRM with MT5 integration following MetaQuotes’ latest moves.

As far as I know, you’re pretty much the only, or one of the very few, alternative platforms that also offers solutions for MetaQuotes. What’s the thinking behind that?

It really comes down to our roots, because that’s exactly where the company started – creating solutions for MT4 and later MT5. As the business evolved, Match-Trader came along, but those earlier solutions stayed in the product lineup.

Looking at the latest integration of our Prop CRM with MT5, we know this is exactly what our clients expect. They’re satisfied with the CRM for MTR, and when expanding their offering to include MT5, moving to a different system just doesn’t make sense. For us, that’s not much of a challenge, and frankly, you simply can’t afford to ignore a platform that still holds the majority of the trading-platform market share.

And what about TradingView – it’s really gained traction recently.

Absolutely. TradingView has done an excellent job building a community around its platform, which explains its popularity among brokers. And we’ve made it easy to quickly switch between our charts and TradingView charts, so if a trader prefers the charting setup they are already familiar with, they can use it.

In general, one of the core pillars at Match-Trade Technologies is creating a chart-oriented platform. The reality is that users spend most of their time analyzing charts, so our goal is to provide a really strong option alongside TradingView charts. That’s why we’re consistently adding new features and improving performance to make the experience even more convenient. Beyond the chart integration itself, Match-Trader can also act as a backend for TradingView – TV on its own provides only the frontend.

There seem to be more and more platform providers popping up – just looking at the iFX Expo Dubai exhibitor list. How are you viewing the competition, and does it change your plans for 2026?

We’re certainly aware of the increasing number of companies entering the space. But as we all know, healthy competition is always positive for the market – it motivates us to keep moving forward, innovate, and find new ways to differentiate ourselves. With Match-Trader, we’re all about delivering an intuitive platform that’s genuinely mobile-friendly.

Actually, not that long ago, one of our clients asked his daughter to download a few different platforms, set up demo accounts, and place a trade on gold. She found Match-Trader the fastest and simplest to navigate, which convinced him to build his entire brokerage around our platform. This confirms our strategy is working, and it’s exactly how we want to continue standing out from other platforms.

Prop trading has been a massive driver for platform growth over the past few years. But what about prediction markets? Could they become the next big thing for the industry?

Prediction markets are certainly worth watching closely, because it’s hard to say exactly where and how far they will go. The space faces far more barriers than prop trading did, so right now it’s too early to say whether they’ll become "the next prop trading" or not.

Even with those uncertainties, we’ve decided to launch a beta version of prediction markets functionality within Match-Trader. It’ll be demoed at iFX Expo in Dubai to collect feedback from brokers, and if there’s genuine interest and real potential, we’ll absolutely continue building it out.

About Match-Trade Technologies

Founded in 2013, Match-Trade Technologies is a global provider of trading solutions for forex brokers, prop trading firms, and financial institutions. Its flagship Match-Trader platform supports flexible deployment as a standalone platform, a back end for proprietary applications, or a dual trading environment, with open APIs enabling seamless external connectivity. Match-Trader features advanced built-in charting tools and also offers TradingView, available either as an integrated charting option within the platform or as a full-featured front end powered by the Match-Trader back end. Match-Trade serves brokers of all sizes – from emerging firms to established global players – delivering end-to-end technology that includes trading platforms, CRM, liquidity connectivity, social and copy trading, and back-office solutions.