Trove Markets Raised $11.5M for a Hyperliquid Product, Then Kept 82% of It After a Chain Switch and a 95% Crash

Trove Markets set out to build a perpetual-futures exchange for collectibles — think leveraged trading on Pokémon cards and CS2 skins — deployed on Hyperliquid. Its January ICO pulled in roughly $11.5 million, far above what the team said it needed.

Four days after that raise closed, and mere hours before its token was due to go live, Trove announced it was abandoning Hyperliquid for Solana. By then, the 500,000 HYPE tokens the project needed to post as a security bond for Hyperliquid's HIP-3 program had already been liquidated — about $10 million worth.

The pivot announcement doubled as an admission: the team said it would hold on to $9.39 million "to keep building" rather than return it to contributors.

TROVE launched regardless, opening at a $20 million fully diluted valuation against only $50,000 in liquidity. The token lost 95% of its value in the first ten minutes of trading. During the collapse, Bubblemaps identified a single entity that had accumulated 12% of the supply across 80 newly created wallets.

Adding to the confusion, founder "Unwise" publicly stated he did not control a wallet that was selling HYPE — and that same wallet resumed selling within minutes of his statement. If the founder truly had no control over it, someone else did — and used the disavowal as cover to keep going.

01An ICO That Was Already Being Gamed Before It Closed

Trove's token sale targeted $2.5 million and instead brought in about $11.5 million — a 4.6x oversubscription. What should have been a straightforward success instead exposed problems before the token even existed.

On January 11, 2026, with the sale minutes from closing, someone on the Trove team altered the smart contract to extend the raise by five days. Shortly afterward, the team reversed the extension and closed the sale on the original schedule.

The brief window when the extension appeared live was not without consequence. Polymarket was running a market titled "Trove public sale total commitments?", letting traders bet on whether the raise would clear certain thresholds. The moment the extension went live, large buy orders appeared — positions between 100,000 and 300,000 shares betting the total would rise now that the window was supposedly longer.

One trader put down an $89,000 wager on that premise. Once Trove reversed the extension, the position was left worth roughly $73,000 less — on a bet that would have paid out only about $200 had it succeeded.

The timing was too precise to be coincidence, and it wasn't isolated: researcher poezdec later showed the manipulation went beyond a single unlucky bettor, noting also that a Trove intern pulled roughly $70,000 out of the pool.

Founder "Unwise" attributed the chaos to discovering a "coordinated cluster of wallets" capable of controlling a large share of the raise, calling the extension "obviously the wrong call" made under pressure with about 25 minutes left on the clock. He promised an independent third-party review of the raise wallets and distribution, with results to be shared publicly.

That promise dates to January 11. No review has since surfaced, and the team's explanation never moved past "we panicked and reversed it" — even as $11.5 million sat in Trove's accounts and someone had already shown they could move markets with a few minutes' advance notice.

02Where the Hyperliquid Money Actually Went

Trove told contributors that $20 million of the raise was earmarked specifically to buy the 500,000 HYPE tokens required as a slashable security bond for Hyperliquid's HIP-3 deployment — a mandatory stake, not an optional one, that validators could slash if the deployer misbehaved. Those tokens were never staked.

On-chain records for wallet 0xebe07e526c4dc5f0005801bbd7d9850c424cf719 tell the actual story. The address received $20 million in USDC bridged from Arbitrum on October 23, 2025. After roughly three weeks of inactivity, on November 13 the funds moved from Perps to Spot, positioning for a HYPE purchase.

In the following weeks, the wallet bought HYPE on the spot market at prices between $28 and $38. On January 19, 2026 — the day after TROVE's original launch date — two TWAP sell orders executed across multiple fills, offloading roughly 99,459 HYPE at around $24 each for about $2.4 million.

That HYPE sale was secondary to a larger movement: $10.4 million in USDC withdrawn to Arbitrum on January 18, followed by another $2.1 million on January 19 — the same day as the token generation event. In total, $12.1 million left the wallet on launch day, from an address the founder would soon claim not to control.

Community member NMTD.HL called out the discrepancy 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 were being converted to cash rather than prepared for deployment.

What followed looked less like a resolution than a performance. Hyperliquid News documented the sequence: shortly after Trove's founder said publicly that he didn't control the wallet and wanted it shut down, "it starts selling again" — within minutes, not hours or days. Either the founder misrepresented his control over the wallet, or someone else with access saw his public statement and sold anyway. Neither reading reflects well on the team.

Of the $20 million raised for the Hyperliquid stake, $12 million ended up on Arbitrum and none reached a staking contract.

03The Chain Switch

On January 16, 2026 — five days after the ICO closed for EVM participants — Trove announced its pivot to Solana. The Hyperliquid integration investors had funded, along with the HIP-3-based perpetuals architecture underpinning the whole raise, was dropped entirely.

Trove attributed the switch to an unnamed "liquidity partner" that had pulled its 500,000 HYPE position. But the tokens weren't withdrawn by some outside partner — they were sold off methodically from the same address the founder later claimed he couldn't control, despite knowing enough about it to publicly address the situation. The "liquidity partner" and Trove appear to have been the same party, and that party had already exited.

The following days brought more red flags. On January 17, ZachXBT reported $45,000 from Trove's Angel Round moving to casino deposit addresses. On January 18, the token generation event — originally set for 7PM UTC — was pushed to 9PM, then moved again to January 19 at 4PM. On January 19, 4PM slipped to 8PM UTC, when the token finally launched — only to lose 95% of its value within ten minutes.

The delays coincided with a shift in framing, from "technical pivot" to "strategic evolution." The underlying figures were simpler: Trove reported total raised at $11,537,719, of which it retained $9,397,403 and refunded $2,440,316 (plus a promised $100,000 distributed automatically), by its own accounting. In practice, the team kept 82% of contributor funds and returned 18%, without seeking anyone's consent.

Trove framed the decision bluntly: keeping the money was "the only path that keeps Trove alive as a real product." Investors who had bought into a Hyperliquid-native perpetuals exchange instead got a promise to rebuild on an entirely different chain, funded with capital raised under different terms — with no new agreement offered, no opt-out, and no formal acknowledgment that the product itself had changed.

04Casino Transfers and Undisclosed Promotions

On January 17, on-chain investigator ZachXBT published findings showing that $45,000 from Trove's Angel Round had moved to a gambling deposit address, traced to source wallet 7nRNzRX2WQ3WxV3eV6gDeJeWTApqefuXNXQRZ1xEh1eh. Money raised to build a collectibles trading platform had instead landed at an online casino.

Trove's founder unwise responded with, "TJRTrades likes to gamble it seems" — a reply that read less like a defense than an admission. ZachXBT's response was immediate: "So now you're admitting to pay influencers for undisclosed ads gotcha."

That exchange pointed to a wider pattern: allegations emerged that Trove had paid influencers to promote the project, sometimes offering them discounted access to the token sale in exchange. One such promoter, known as waleswoosh, was accused of receiving roughly $8,000 in USDC to promote the ICO. He later acknowledged failing to disclose the payment while also maintaining he hadn't been paid to promote it.

DidiTrading responded by cutting waleswoosh's score on the reputation platform Ethos, explaining: "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."

Separately, an investor using the handle metaversejoji described his own experience: he invested in October on a friend's tip, was later approached to become an advisor closer to launch, and was never told about the Solana pivot or the other changes that upset the community. When he asked for a refund two days before launch, he says he was told he'd be "made whole at TGE" — with the implication that little money remained after extensive influencer payouts. He posted his original purchase transaction as evidence and summarized: "I honestly didn't DD this enough... I'm sorry if I made you buy this - at least know i got scammed too." After the token's 95% crash, "made whole" turned out to mean very little.

Separately, the Hyperliquid Foundation weighed in indirectly: its only visible response was a 10,000 HYPE donation to ZachXBT — reportedly the second-largest institutional contribution he had received. The ecosystem Trove had just abandoned ended up funding the investigator scrutinizing it.

05The Launch and the Crash

TROVE went live on Solana at 8PM UTC on January 19, 2026, trading on Dexscreener with a starting fully diluted valuation of $20 million against only about $50,000 in liquidity. That imbalance meant any significant selling would move the price sharply — and selling arrived almost immediately.

Within ten minutes, TROVE had lost 95% of its value, falling from roughly $0.02 to $0.0008. Market cap dropped from $20 million to under $1 million, with some trackers recording lows near $330,000.

Bubblemaps flagged unusual distribution during the crash: one entity had accumulated approximately 12% of the total supply using 80 newly created wallets, each funded through the non-custodial exchange ChangeHero with matching patterns and no prior on-chain history — a classic sybil setup. Bubblemaps stated it found no confirmed link to the Trove team itself, though the concentration of coordinated wallets ahead of a thinly-liquid launch was damaging regardless of who was behind it.

Investors described the losses directly. One participant who put in $20,000 expected roughly $14,000 in USDC and $6,000 in TROVE, but received $600 total after the crash. Another who invested $10,000 had a pre-TGE refund value around $3,000; after the crash, that position was worth $285.

Burwick Law, a firm known for consumer-protection cases in crypto — including against HawkTuah, Libra, and Pump Fun — began soliciting Trove-affected clients. No lawsuit has been filed as of this writing, but the groundwork appears to be forming.

06Who Is Behind Trove

The $11.5 million raise sits behind a pseudonymous founder and a British Virgin Islands shell entity. "Unwise" is the only public name tied to Trove's founding — no disclosed legal identity, no LinkedIn, no verifiable track record. ZachXBT circulated a photo reportedly showing the individual introducing himself as Trove's founder at a Token2049 side event in October 2025.

According to researcher "Eyeonchains," corporate filings point to an entity called PerpsCollectibles Ltd, registered in the BVI — a jurisdiction commonly chosen for limited disclosure requirements. The team had also claimed MiCAR verification under the EU's crypto regulatory framework, but that verification page now returns a 404 error.

Separately, NMTD8 noted that Trove had reportedly invested in a project called XMR1 — described by NMTD8 as "extremely shady" — using proceeds from the HYPE sales, adding another destination to the list of places investor money went besides the stated product.

Pseudonymity alone doesn't indicate wrongdoing; many legitimate projects operate that way. But combined with a wallet whose control the founder disavowed while it kept trading, a promised audit that never appeared, a same-day chain pivot before launch, and 82% of raised funds retained without consent, the anonymity here functions less as privacy and more as insulation from accountability.

07Tracing the Funds

AMLBot traced the ICO proceeds from collection through to their current locations. Contributions accumulated in an Ethereum mainnet contract at 0xab3629ee871FA241Fc39B514EEBEF0A23048709c, then consolidated into a wallet registered under the ENS name gtrove.eth: 0x13b4F2c4943Cc80762B79dA657f8C3861b70614C.

Per AMLBot, most of the funds were converted to stablecoins and remain dormant across several wallets, though about $1 million had already moved to the centralized exchanges Bybit and Binance. The team's operational wallets, per the same analysis, hold most of the remaining balance in stablecoins on Ethereum.

Separately, investigator dethective identified a wallet that received $65,000 in USDC from ICO proceeds and used it to buy roughly $70,000 of the memecoin $DONT, moving from source address 8XkRxwRRRNRPRaGmZ5FEykFH9JxnzWUAYpn3Ecx4eqey to destination GH5AJgtBiEe3q6onD99LJzMCADBSbjad4w7EbUMxXQa8. Whether that wallet belongs to the team or to an early investor made whole through a refund is unconfirmed — but investor capital originally raised for a collectibles exchange is now exposed to memecoin volatility.

08Aftermath

Trove did not disappear in the conventional sense — no Tornado Cash run, no deleted contracts, no vanishing team. Instead, the project stated: "We are not disappearing. We are not taking the money and running. We are still building."

What has materialized so far is a token trading at a fraction of a cent, an unrequested chain migration, and a chain of incidents running from the Polymarket manipulation through casino transfers to memecoin trades. ZachXBT has raised concerns publicly, Burwick Law is gathering potential claimants, and AMLBot has traced funds to team-controlled wallets and exchange accounts. The Hyperliquid Foundation, whose ecosystem Trove had used to raise funds, effectively backed the investigation into the project via its donation to ZachXBT.

Trove maintains that trust will return through delivery. But delivery depends on accountability, which in turn depends on verifiable identity — something investors still lack, alongside a paper trail of wallet activity showing their contributions funding memecoin purchases instead of product development. The $9.4 million retained buys the team time; whether it buys an actual product remains open.

On January 27, Trove reappeared with updated branding, announcing an "official transition to Solana," as though the preceding two weeks amounted to a minor scheduling issue rather than an $11.5 million controversy. Whether this reflects genuine intent, indifference to the reputational damage, or simply testing how many contributors remain willing to follow along is unclear.

New branding hasn't resolved any of the outstanding questions.