Trove of BS
Pokémon cards and CS2 skins were supposed to be the product. Turns out, the investors were.
Trove Markets pitched a perpetual DEX for collectibles on Hyperliquid, leverage trading for the stuff in your childhood closet. $11.5 million flowed in during January's ICO.
Four days later, the team announced they were pivoting to Solana. Hours before the token went live. The 500,000 HYPE tokens required for Hyperliquid deployment? Already dumped, $10 million worth sold.
The pivot came with a confession dressed as strategy: $9.39 million would be retained "to keep building."
TROVE launched anyway. Twenty million dollar FDV. Fifty thousand dollars in liquidity. Ten minutes to a 95% collapse, while one entity quietly received 12% of the supply across 80 fresh wallets.
Then came the denial that broke itself. Founder "Unwise" publicly disavowed control of a wallet dumping HYPE tokens.
Minutes later, that same wallet resumed selling.
When your founder says "shut down the wallet" and the wallet keeps running, who's really holding the keys?
Trove's ICO was supposed to raise $2.5 million. It pulled in roughly $11.5 million, a 4.6x oversubscription that should have been a victory lap.
Instead, it became a case study in how to torch credibility before your token even exists.
January 11th, 2026: Minutes before the scheduled close, someone on the Trove team modified the smart contract to extend the sale by five days. More time, more money, more opportunity.
Shortly after, they reversed course. No extension. ICO closed as originally planned.
That window wasn't empty.
Polymarket had a prediction market running called "Trove public sale total commitments?" allowing traders to bet on whether the raise would exceed certain thresholds. When the extension went live, large buy orders materialized, positions sized between 100,000 and 300,000 shares betting on higher totals now that more money could flow in.
One trader rushed to capitalize on the perceived extension, placing an $89,000 wager. When Trove reversed course, that position collapsed to a roughly $73,000 loss on a bet that would have yielded about $200 if successful.
Precision timing. Precision losses.
poezdec later confirmed the manipulation extended beyond one unlucky trader. It was also highlighted that a Trove intern extracted approximately $70,000 from the pool.
Pseudonymous founder "Unwise" blamed the chaos on discovering a "coordinated cluster of wallets" that could control a large portion of the raise.
The extension was "obviously the wrong call," made under pressure with roughly 25 minutes remaining.
His solution: Promise an independent third-party review of the raise wallets and distribution and will share the results with the community.
That was January 11th.
The review never materialized. The explanation never evolved beyond "we panicked and fixed it."
Meanwhile, $11.5 million sits in Trove's accounts from the ICO, and someone had just demonstrated they could move markets with a few minute head start.
If your ICO gets manipulated and your response is a promise you never keep, what happens when the real money starts moving?
The $10 Million Denial
Trove raised $20 million with a specific purpose: acquire 500,000 HYPE tokens to stake as the required security bond for Hyperliquid's HIP-3 deployment.
This wasn't optional. HIP-3 requires projects to stake 500,000 HYPE tokens as slashable collateral, a security bond that validators can slash if a deployer misbehaves.
Trove told investors that's where the money was going.
This Wallet tells a different story:
0xebe07e526c4dc5f0005801bbd7d9850c424cf719
On-chain data shows this wallet received $20 million USDC from Arbitrum on October 23, 2025. Three weeks of silence. Then on November 13th, the funds moved from Perps to Spot - positioning for HYPE purchases.
Over the following weeks, the wallet accumulated HYPE tokens through spot buys at prices ranging from $28 to $38.
Then came January 19th, 2026 - the day after TROVE was set to launch. Two TWAP sell orders - algorithmic liquidations executed across multiple fills - moved approximately 99,459 HYPE tokens at prices around $24, netting roughly $2.4 million.
But the HYPE sales were the sideshow.
The main event: $10.4 million USDC withdrawn to Arbitrum on January 18th. Another $2.1 million followed on January 19th - the same day as the TGE.
$12.1 million extracted on launch day. From a wallet the founder would later claim he didn't control.
Community member NMTD.HL spotted the pattern early: "If Trove had good intentions, they would have staked the 500K HYPE to be ready for HIP-3 deployments by now."
They hadn't. Because the tokens weren't being prepared for deployment. They were being converted to cash.
Then came the public theater.
Hyperliquid News documented what happened next: "A few minutes after the founder of TroveMarkets said that he does not control the wallet, and that he is asking for the wallet to be shut down, it starts selling again."
Minutes. Not hours. Not days. Minutes.
Two possibilities exist. Either Unwise lied about wallet control, or someone with access watched his public plea and decided to keep selling anyway.
Neither scenario suggests a team operating in good faith.
The denial wasn't damage control. It was a receipt.
$20 million in. $12 million to Arbitrum. Zero to the staking contract.
What do you tell investors when the Hyperliquid money is already on a different chain?
The Pivot
January 16th, 2026 - Five days after the ICO closed for EVM participants, Trove dropped the announcement that they were pivoting to Solana.
The Hyperliquid integration that investors paid for? Abandoned. The perp DEX architecture built on HIP-3 rails? Scrapped. The entire technical premise of the raise? Gone.
Trove blamed an unnamed "liquidity partner" who had withdrawn their 500,000 HYPE position.
Convenient framing. The tokens weren't withdrawn from some external partner's wallet. They were sold, methodically, from an address the founder claimed he couldn't control but somehow knew to publicly address.
The liquidity partner didn't lose faith in Trove. The liquidity was Trove, and it had already exited.
January 17th: ZachXBT flagged $45,000 from the Trove Angel Round flowing to casino deposit addresses.
January 18th: Token generation event originally scheduled for 7PM UTC on January 18th. Delayed to 9PM. Then pushed to January 19th at 4PM.
January 19th: 4PM became 8PM UTC. Token finally launched. Then it crashed 95% in ten minutes.
Each delay bought time for the narrative to shift from "technical pivot" to "strategic evolution."
The numbers told a simpler story.
Total raised: $11,537,719
Retained: $9,397,403
Refunded (According to Trove): $2,440,316, plus a promised $100,000 distributed automatically.
Eighty-two percent kept. Eighteen percent returned. Zero consent obtained.
Trove's justification landed with the subtlety of a brick: retaining the funds was "the only path that keeps Trove alive as a real product."
Investors bought a Hyperliquid-native perpetuals exchange. They received a promise to rebuild everything from scratch on a different chain, funded by money raised under different pretenses.
No new terms offered. No opt-out mechanism. No acknowledgment that the product had fundamentally changed.
Just a team holding $9.4 million and asking for patience.
When the bait is Hyperliquid and the switch is Solana, what exactly are investors supposed to trust next?
Casino Money and Paid Shills
January 17th, ZachXBT, crypto's most prolific on-chain investigator, posted findings that turned bad optics into something worse.
$45,000 from Trove's Angel Round had moved to a casino deposit address.
Source wallet: 7nRNzRX2WQ3WxV3eV6gDeJeWTApqefuXNXQRZ1xEh1eh
Investor capital, earmarked for building a collectibles trading platform, rerouted to gambling.
Trove's defense made things worse.
“TJRTrades likes to gamble it seems.” was the odd response from Trove’s founder unwise.
ZachXBT's response was immediate: “So now you’re admitting to pay influencers for undisclosed ads gotcha.”
The defense wasn't exculpatory. Could it have been an unwise confession?
Reports revealed a broader pattern.
Accusations surfaced of Trove paying influencers to promote the project to their followers, while offering them discounts to participate in the token sale.
Some guy named waleswoosh was accused of receiving approximately $8,000 in USDC for promoting the Trove ICO.
After the backlash, he apologized for failing to disclose the payment, and also claimed that he was not paid to promote the ICO.
DidiTrading slashed his credibility score on Ethos, a crypto reputation platform.
Didi’s reason was pretty telling: “I slashed waleswoosh on Ethos since I suspect no one has the balls to do it because he is a "reputable" figure in this space. It's time to expose all the cockroaches who kept shilling $TROVE with undisclosed paid promotions, even after massive red flags emerged.”
Meteversejoji posted his own confession. He'd invested in October after a tip from a mutual friend, then was approached closer to launch to become an advisor and "wear the badge."
Neither he nor the other advisors were told about the Solana pivot or any of the changes that "got whole CT mad."
When he requested a refund two days before launch, the response was that he'd be "made whole at TGE" - as if there weren't any funds left, "since he was paying out tons of people to shill the pre sale with our money."
He shared his original buy transaction as proof.
His closing thought: "I honestly didn't DD this enough... I'm sorry if I made you buy this - at least know i got scammed too."
TGE came. The token crashed 95%. Being made whole looked a lot like being made a fool.
Hyperliquid Foundation watched all of this unfold.
Their response: a 10,000 HYPE donation to ZachXBT.
This marked the second-largest institutional contribution ZachXBT had ever received.
The chain Trove abandoned was now funding the detective examining Trove's behavior. The signal couldn't have been clearer.
When your former ecosystem partner bankrolls the investigation into your conduct, the verdict is forming before the case is closed.
What happens when a token built on this foundation actually goes live?
Ten Minutes to Zero
January 19th, 2026. 8PM UTC. TROVE went live on Solana.
Starting fully diluted valuation: $20 million.
Liquidity at launch: Approximately $50,000.
The math was a setup. A $20 million valuation supported by $50,000 in liquidity meant any meaningful selling would crater the price. And meaningful selling arrived immediately.
Ten minutes. That's how long it took for TROVE to lose 95% of its value.
Price at launch: Roughly $0.02. Price ten minutes later: $0.0008. Market cap collapsed from $20 million to under $1 million, with some trackers showing lows around $330,000.
Bubblemaps flagged something suspicious during the carnage.
One entity had received approximately 12% of the total token supply.
The method: 80 fresh wallets, each funded through ChangeHero, a non-custodial exchange. Identical funding patterns. No prior on-chain activity. Classic sybil structure.
Bubblemaps found no definitive link to the Trove team. But 12% concentrated in coordinated wallets, positioned before a launch with razor-thin liquidity, doesn't require team involvement to be catastrophic.
Someone was ready. Everyone else was exit liquidity.
Investor testimonials painted the aftermath.
One participant had invested $20,000. They expected roughly $14,000 in USDC and $6,000 in TROVE.
Total received after the crash: $600.
Another put in $10,000. Pre-TGE refund value sat around $3,000. Post-crash, that position was worth $285.
Burwick Law, a firm that specializes in consumer protection specifically for crypto, including cases against HawkTuah, Libra, and Pump Fun, opened its doors to Trove victims.
No formal lawsuit has been filed yet. But the infrastructure for one is assembling.
When your token needs ten minutes to lose 95% of its value, is that a market failure or a feature working as designed?
The Ghosts Behind the Curtain
Behind $11.5 million in investor capital sits a pseudonym and a British Virgin Islands shell company.
"Unwise" is the only name attached to Trove's founding. No legal identity. No LinkedIn. No verifiable history.
ZachXBT shared a photo from a Token2049 offshoot event, introducing themselves as its founder unwisecap during a side event in October 2025.
Corporate filings, according to sleuth "Eyeonchains," point to PerpsCollectibles Ltd, registered in the BVI. Jurisdiction of choice for projects that prefer opacity over accountability.
The Trove team had claimed MiCAR verification, the EU's crypto regulatory framework. That verification page now returns a 404. The compliance theater didn't even outlast the token launch.
NMTD8 flagged another thread worth pulling. Trove had allegedly invested in XMR1, a project NMTD8 described as "extremely shady," using proceeds from HYPE token sales.
Investor funds, raised for a Hyperliquid DEX, potentially routed through a questionable side investment. The pattern of money flowing everywhere except toward the stated product kept repeating.
Anonymous teams aren't automatically guilty. Plenty of legitimate projects operate pseudonymously.
But anonymous teams who deny wallet control while the wallet keeps selling, who promise audits that never arrive, who pivot chains hours before launch and keep 82% of the money?
That's not privacy. That's cover.
If nobody knows who you are, nobody can hold you accountable. And so far, that's exactly how it's played out.
When the only thing more elusive than the product is the team behind it, what exactly are investors left holding?
Following the Money
The blockchain doesn't forget. Neither do the analysts watching it.
AMLBot traced the ICO funds from their origin to their current resting places. The path wasn't subtle.
ICO contributions accumulated in this contract on Ethereum mainnet:
0xab3629ee871FA241Fc39B514EEBEF0A23048709c
From there, everything flowed to a single address registered under the ENS handle gtrove.eth:
0x13b4F2c4943Cc80762B79dA657f8C3861b70614C
Most funds converted to stablecoins and sat dormant across several wallets. But approximately $1 million has already moved to centralized exchanges, specifically Bybit and Binance.
The team's operational wallets, identified by AMLBot, hold the majority of remaining funds in stablecoins on Ethereum mainnet.
Then came the gambling.
On-chain investigator dethective flagged a wallet that had received $65,000 in USDC from the ICO proceeds. That wallet bought approximately $70,000 worth of $DONT, the memecoin of the moment.
Source Address: 8XkRxwRRRNRPRaGmZ5FEykFH9JxnzWUAYpn3Ecx4eqey
Destination: GH5AJgtBiEe3q6onD99LJzMCADBSbjad4w7EbUMxXQa8
Whether this wallet belongs to the team or an "angel" close enough to secure a refund remains unclear. What's clear is that investor capital raised for a collectibles DEX is now riding memecoin volatility.
Casino deposits. Memecoin speculation. CEX transfers. The money meant to "keep building" keeps finding everywhere else to go.
When investor funds move faster than product development, what's actually under construction?
Trove didn't rug in the traditional sense. No Tornado Cash. No deleted contracts. No midnight vanishing act.
They did something almost more insulting, they stayed.
"We are not disappearing. We are not taking the money and running. We are still building."
At least, that's the official line.
What's been delivered so far: A token trading at fractions of a penny, a pivot nobody asked for, and a trail of broken promises stretching from Polymarket manipulation to casino deposits to memecoin speculation.
ZachXBT called out some red flags. Burwick Law is circling. AMLBot has traced the funds to team wallets and centralized exchanges. The Hyperliquid Foundation supported the investigation into a project that used their name to raise millions.
Trove says trust will be earned back through execution. But execution requires accountability, and accountability requires identity. Right now, investors have neither, just wallet addresses showing their money buying memecoins.
$9.4 million bought a lot of runway. Whether it bought a product or just more time remains the only question that matters.
And yet, on January 27th, Trove resurfaced with a fresh logo and banner, announcing their "official transition to Solana" as if the past two weeks were a minor inconvenience rather than an $11.5 million catastrophe.
Not sure if they lost the plot entirely, are trolling their community or seeing how many suckers are left.
Maybe they're treating this like Pokémon - gotta catch 'em all. Except the collectibles they're catching are investor’s funds.
New branding, same questions. Unwise indeed.
When "we're still building" becomes indistinguishable from "we're still gambling," who's really being constructed here, the platform or the exit?
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