Prop trading firms have long been a staple of the Forex world, offering traders access to capital if they can prove discipline and skill. But too often, the model has been plagued by rug pulls, hidden rules and restrictions, and firms that deny payouts the moment traders start winning.
In early 2023, Dylan Loomer, better known as TraderMayne, brought a prop trading business idea to Alex Miningham. Alex dug in, researched the FX space, and quickly saw both the potential and the problems. The demand was real, and the business model could work, but credibility was nowhere to be found. Together with Loomer, he set out to take the best parts of prop trading, strip away the broken incentives, and rebuild it for crypto traders. No arbitrary rules. No withheld payouts. Just a straightforward proposition: if you pass the evaluation and get funded, you get paid what you earn without hassle.
That’s how Breakout was born in 2023. And less than two years later, the bet is validated: Kraken has acquired Breakout. The deal affirms the trust Breakout worked so hard to build and represents an opportunity to scale that model globally, supported by Kraken’s arsenal of resources.
Getting His Fresh Start
Entrepreneurship is more of a reflex than a career choice for Alex Miningham. Before Breakout, he had already built technology startups across higher education, travel, and beverage alcohol, each with a consumer or data focus.
Crypto entered his life in 2017. He got into Bitcoin and Ethereum, watched the ICO boom and bust, and left with the conviction that he wanted to be part of the industry long term. But he still had a company to run. That business (an ecommerce product in the beverage alcohol space) was acquired during COVID, freeing him to think seriously about what would come next.
After spending over a decade raising venture capital as a founder, Alex aspired to sit on the other side of the table and ultimately joined a seed-stage crypto venture fund. As a general partner at Ascensive Assets, he spent two and a half years leading the firm's infrastructure investments. The role gave him a bird’s-eye view of the industry, but it also left him restless in early 2023. “We reviewed maybe 3,000 projects in roughly 30 months and invested in 14 or 15,” he recalls. “It was becoming super time-consuming, and I just wasn’t finding the right projects to really dig my teeth into.”
That nagging itch to build again meant there was already an open door when Dylan Loomer reached out at that time. Loomer had been pitched on starting a prop firm, modeled after the evaluation-based businesses that had gained traction in the Forex space. He asked Alex to take a look.
What Alex saw across the next two months wasn’t encouraging. “The industry was just riddled with scams, rug pulls, and inexperienced operators,” he says. The model itself made sense, but credibility was nowhere to be found. And that’s when the idea clicked. “I knew there was an opportunity here—but not in the FX space. We’re both crypto native. Why don’t we bring this business model to crypto?”
From Idea to Breakout
Once the decision was made, Miningham and Loomer didn’t wait for outside funding. They bootstrapped Breakout with their own capital for nine months to build the foundation.
They spent that time diligencing every piece of the stack: what technology platforms to white-label for the first iteration of the product, what roles to hire for, and what kind of people they wanted on the team. “We really wanted to make sure that we were hiring for a specific purpose rather than just hiring to hire,” Miningham says.
That approach paid off. Through Loomer’s deep industry network, they brought in two of the most respected names in crypto trading: Cred (CryptoCred) and Adam (abetrade). Both joined early and remain senior leaders of the company. Cred became the behind-the-scenes strategist shaping core decisions. Adam brought deep expertise in trading and prop trading mechanics. Together, the team balanced credibility, trading knowledge, and operational execution (more on this later).
By November 2023, the star-studded cast was assembled, and Breakout was ready to launch.
Early Traction
Breakout’s user base was initially seeded through Loomer’s trading community.
The platform’s model resonated right away. Crypto’s trading culture—a blend of high risk, high conviction, and high appetite for leverage—was a natural fit. Traders were drawn to the idea of profiting from their trading abilities without putting their own capital at risk (Breakout doesn’t custody users’ capital, so the only thing they stand to lose is the evaluation fee). If they failed the evaluation, they could start over. Once they passed, they gained access to notional capital and could keep up to 90% of the profits they earn.
From the beginning, Miningham recognized that the puzzle to solve for was education.
“The biggest hurdle that we knew we were going to face was education. Educating the crypto world on this new business model,” he says. “Not demand, demand was there. It was just educating people on how it works and why it’s valuable so that we could scale globally.”
Breakout leaned heavily into content and paid channels to show traders how prop trading worked, and how it could be a stepping stone to building a bankroll. They started building out their marketing team and began onboarding business development leads for the company’s affiliate program.
By summer 2024, the company launched its affiliate program, focused on APAC, Europe, and North America. The move proved pivotal. Affiliates, weary of the overcrowded shill wars surrounding the same centralized exchanges, found Breakout’s unique value proposition easy to promote. Positioned in its own niche and not directly competing with CEXs, Breakout stood out, and the affiliate program quickly became one of the company’s strongest growth drivers.
Miningham says that the biggest turning point came with the introduction of the one-step plan, one of Cred’s many winning ideas that the team implemented. Originally, traders had to pass a two-step evaluation process to receive funding. Streamlining it into a single pass—sometimes even achievable with one strong trade—unlocked a wave of new participation. It became the growth catalyst that pushed Breakout’s numbers into true hockey-stick territory.
Challenges And Learnings
However well-timed and breezy the journey may sound so far, Breakout’s path certainly wasn’t one without challenges.
At launch, the company relied on two white-labeled systems: one for the trading terminal and another for risk management and administrative functions. It worked, but it wasn’t built to last or scale.
Over the 18 months that followed the launch, the team invested heavily in building their own infrastructure: a fast, purpose-built risk engine and admin system. The reason for doing so was that Breakout aspired to shift from a traditional B-book model, where firms pay traders off of their own balance sheet, to an A-book model, where funded trades are routed directly to the live markets. That shift mattered in a big way because it directly aligned Breakout with its traders.
“If somebody makes a million dollars trading a memecoin, we’ll have the million-dollar P&L in order to pay them out,” Miningham explains. “It provides the trader with more confidence that they’re actually going to get paid when they generate profits.”
Solving that, Miningham says, was the biggest technical challenge that the team faced.
Scaling fast also meant facing the growing pains familiar to any startup: hiring quickly, building processes around operations and HR, and keeping the culture tight-knit while the team expanded. For Miningham, those challenges were personal. In past ventures with remote teams, he admits, he didn’t lean hard enough into culture. This time, he made it a priority.
“I think the biggest takeaway for me in this business was I was very mindful of the type of culture that I wanted to build from day one,” he says. “We’re a fully remote workforce, and that has its challenges, but it also has a ton of benefits. We’ve really leaned into that to ensure that everybody who works at Breakout wants to be here and is motivated to be here. That was the mistake I made in some of my past companies—not really leaning into the culture and making sure we were driving it from the top down. If you don’t, you risk people freeloading their way through, which obviously halts progress.”
That meant avoiding busywork and protecting people’s time. “We don’t have meetings just to have meetings,” Miningham explains. “We’re very purposeful with our meeting cadence and agendas. If there isn’t a specific takeaway, we won’t hold it.” Instead, the team leaned on async communication, using Slack and impromptu huddles to keep momentum without falling victim to corporate theater.
It also meant building a culture that worked hard but stayed lighthearted. The team has a ton of fun every day, but not at the expense of results and accountability. “We drive this culture of hard work, but having fun while we do it,” Miningham says. “Leadership works incredibly hard, and when new people come in and see that, they want to do that too. If you don’t, you’re just going to get left behind.”
Looking back, Miningham sees that emphasis on culture as one of his biggest growth areas as a founder. He’s candid about the mistakes he made in past companies, and says he remains determined not to repeat them. “Everybody wants to be here,” he says. “Everybody wakes up and is excited to get to work because they enjoy the people they work with, and they enjoy what they’re working on. And if that doesn’t fit for you, that’s okay. We’ll find somebody else. But that’s the type of culture we recruit for and make sure we maintain.”
Built On A Trust Moat
One of the team’s defining early moments was the decision to strip away the arbitrary rules and restrictions that defined so many Forex prop firms.
In that world, traders often faced caps on profits, bans on trading during news events, or convoluted rules designed to benefit the firm at the traders' expense, oftentimes denying the biggest winners their earned profits. Breakout went the opposite direction to maximize trader friendliness. “We decided to build our business model around solving for almost zero rules,” Miningham explains. Traders could enter an evaluation, trade how they wanted, and, if they got funded, continue with the same freedom in the funded environment.
That philosophy led to the company’s defining competitive advantage: trust.
“I think the biggest thing that took some time to really stick, but is now one of the blue-chip qualities that defines Breakout, is the fact that we've never denied a single payout to a funded trader,” Miningham says. “We very intentionally built a trustworthy brand. And so people know when they come to Breakout and they trade, they're going to get paid. At the end of the day, that's the main draw: our brand and the trust we've built within the industry. And now that we're backed by Kraken, that only solidifies that sort of trust moat.”
And that trust wasn’t just generated by policy. It came from a team whose mix of skills and credibility turned the company into one that traders could believe in.
While Miningham brought the operational and entrepreneurial backbone to Breakout, the company’s trajectory wouldn’t have been the same without his co-leaders. Each brought something distinct to the table.
Take co-founder Dylan Loomer, to start. For years, he’s been a globally recognizable voice in Crypto Twitter, streaming and sharing trading insights with a massive audience. That credibility made him the public face of Breakout, who could put the model in front of traders and explain why it mattered. But his role wasn’t limited to visibility. Loomer’s instincts about community-building, distribution, and trading shaped how Breakout onboarded users from its early days. Miningham noted with some amazement: “He’s the best at what he does. He doesn’t prep for his streams—he just wings it. I don’t know how he does it. I could never do what he does.”
Then we have Cred. He’s known as one of the sharpest educators in the space, someone who has built his reputation on years of free, no-strings-attached content. Inside Breakout, his combination of mental firepower and trader credibility made him the company’s strategy lead.
“He is intellectually one of the smartest people I’ve ever met in my entire life,” Miningham says. Many of Breakout’s defining decisions—the launch of the one-step plan, the call to ditch FX early and go all-in on crypto, and countless other product tweaks—came directly from Cred’s judgment. Watching him grow into that role over the last few years has been amazing. He’s taken ownership of strategy across the entire organization and has his eyes and ears everywhere.”
Finally, Adam brought something less front-facing but equally essential: deep technical expertise in trading mechanics. As Breakout’s Head of Trading with years of experience and a deep command of microstructure, he was pivotal in the team’s monumental move from B-book to A-book trading. “He’s a microstructure expert—he’s been trading a long, long time, and he’s been around the prop industry for many years,” Miningham says. “We couldn’t have done the move to A-book without him.” Adam’s insider knowledge proved invaluable in architecting Breakout’s evolution and ensuring the firm could scale with confidence.
Together, the group formed a balance. Cred, the strategist. Loomer, the public face. Adam, the technical trading architect. And Miningham, the operator tying it all together. It was the mix that turned Breakout from an idea into a company Kraken wanted to acquire.
Building Toward Kraken
As Breakout gained traction, Miningham started to see the company less as a standalone destination and more as a stepping stone. For entry-level and mid-level traders, Breakout offered a way for traders to build a bankroll without risking their own capital. The natural next step was to take those profits into a centralized exchange to trade perps, buy spot, or run more complex strategies.
That’s what made Kraken the ideal fit. “We see ourselves as a stepping stone,” Miningham says. “If you make money from prop, you can load it into your margin account to trade perps or even buy spot. That customer lifecycle is where we sit within the Kraken ecosystem now. We are the top of funnel for Kraken to bring in new users that want to build a bankroll, that then eventually want to graduate and do other cool things within the Kraken suite of products.”
For Kraken, the acquisition was about philosophy, as well as expanding its product suite. Kraken Co-CEO Arjun Sethi described Breakout’s model as “a filter for scalable signal,” a way to allocate capital based on proof of skill rather than access to capital itself. “In a world that is rapidly shifting from who you know to what you know, we want to build systems that reward demonstrated performance, not pedigree,” he said.
That ethos resonated with Miningham. “Breakout gives traders a performance-based starting point. Kraken delivers the scale and tools to grow. Together, both companies form a unified ecosystem that supports the full trader journey from education through independent capital deployment,” he said in the acquisition announcement.
The cultural alignment mattered just as much. Breakout wasn’t interested in bolting itself onto any exchange. Kraken’s team felt different: crypto native, ambitious, and building toward a one-stop shop for global traders. “You see Kraken going to purchase NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion and other companies they’ve been active with in M&A,” Miningham explains. “You can tell they’re building this ecosystem and all of the different rails that tie together so that no matter what asset you trade, you could do it all under the same hood.”
That vision sealed the deal, giving the Breakout team confidence that they could take their model global while keeping its trader-first ethos intact.
Proving Credibility Matters
Breakout’s rise from a bootstrapped idea to a Kraken acquisition is more than a founder success story. It’s proof that credibility still matters in an industry that too often rewards flash over substance. By building a prop firm that has never denied a payout, stripped away arbitrary rules, and overall puts traders first, Miningham and his team reclaimed a model long plagued by distrust and showed how it could thrive in crypto.
The story of Breakout is also a reminder of how crypto evolves. Some of the most powerful innovations don’t come from chasing the latest narrative or layering infrastructure for its own sake. They can come from taking a simple, time-tested idea and rebuilding it with integrity.
Start building your bankroll with Breakout - https://www.kraken.com/breakout
