Trove’s sudden pivot sparks investor backlash
I think this situation with Trove Markets is becoming a bit of a mess, honestly. The team raised over $11.5 million specifically for building on Hyperliquid, but then they announced a pivot to Solana just days before their token launch. That timing seems, well, questionable at best.
What’s really got people upset is that Trove says they’re keeping $9.4 million of investor money to build on Solana instead. They claim this is the “only path that keeps Trove alive as a real product.” But investors gave them money for a Hyperliquid project, not a Solana one. It’s not surprising that dozens of investors are demanding refunds.
One of the builders, someone called “Unwise,” blamed the pivot on a liquidity partner withdrawing 500,000 HYPE tokens needed for the Hyperliquid integration. But that explanation hasn’t really calmed anyone down. People are asking how they can trust a team to build a complex perpetual DEX when they can’t even manage their token launch properly.
Token launch turns disastrous
The token launch itself was pretty much a disaster. The TROVE token dropped more than 95% in just ten minutes after launching. It went from around $20 million market cap to below $1 million. That’s brutal for anyone who bought in early.
There’s some interesting data from Bubblemaps showing one entity received 12% of the token supply through 80 fresh wallets. Those wallets were funded from ChangeHero, a non-custodial exchange. Bubblemaps says they didn’t find evidence linking those clusters to the Trove team, but it still looks suspicious to regular investors.
Team promises to keep building
Despite all this, Trove says they’re not going anywhere. They claim they’re not “taking the money and running” and that they’ll “earn trust back through execution.” But that’s going to be a tough sell after what just happened.
They’ve already spent some of the funds, or plan to spend them, on development teams, a CTO, advisors, and marketing. They did refund about $2.44 million to investors and plan to refund another $100,000 to ICO participants. But that still leaves them with most of the money for a project that’s completely different from what investors funded.
New direction focuses on collectibles
What’s interesting is their new direction. They want to focus on perpetual trading for collectibles like Pokémon cards and Counter-Strike 2 skins. Bitwise, a crypto asset manager, predicted this market could grow to $21.4 billion. So maybe there’s a real opportunity there.
But the trust issue is huge now. When a team changes direction this dramatically and keeps most of the investor money, it creates serious questions about their decision-making process. The community reaction on X has been pretty harsh, with people calling it the “biggest scam in crypto ATM.”
I’m not sure what happens next. Trove says they’re in it for the long haul, but they’ve burned a lot of bridges with this move. Building trust back will take more than just promises—it’ll take actual, transparent execution over a long period. And with the token already down 95%, they’re starting from a pretty deep hole.
