Trove Markets Ditches Hyperliquid for Solana and Faces ICO Refund Revolt

Trove Markets is facing a backlash from its own backers after abruptly abandoning its Hyperliquid integration to rebuild on Solana, weeks after raising more than 11.5 million USD in a token sale marketed almost entirely around the Hyperliquid ecosystem.

The pivot, announced in a post on X on Friday and framed as a response to changed operating constraints, has triggered refund demands from participants who argue the project they funded no longer exists in the form they paid for.

“People did not invest in your ICO for you to launch on Solana,” one user wrote, in a reaction widely echoed across the project’s community. Others urged Trove to return the funds entirely and relaunch under revised terms rather than redirect capital raised for one chain to a completely different one.

A liquidity partner pulled 500,000 HYPE

According to a builder known as Unwise, the decision was forced by a liquidity partner withdrawing 500,000 HYPE tokens that were required to support the planned integration. “This changes our constraints: we’re no longer building on Hyperliquid rails, so we’re rebuilding the perp DEX on Solana from the ground up,” Unwise wrote.

The withdrawal cuts deeper than ordinary treasury churn. In November, Trove raised a separate 20 million USD specifically to acquire the 500,000 HYPE tokens needed for Hyperliquid’s mandatory HIP-3 stake, a slashable bond mechanism designed to secure new perpetual markets on the platform. With that stake gone, the technical premise of the project collapsed, and the team chose a full migration over attempting to restore the position.

Rebuilding a perpetual DEX on Solana from scratch is not a port. It means new infrastructure, new liquidity relationships, new security assumptions, and a timeline that Trove has already admitted will slip. “Due to the move to Solana and the refund processing, we need more time to execute this correctly,” the team said.

Refund confusion compounds the anger

The governance questions extend beyond the chain choice itself. Trove first announced the sale had surpassed 11.5 million USD and would include pro-rata refunds ahead of the token generation event, then announced an extension intended to improve distribution. The conflicting messages around whether the ICO would be extended created confusion among participants and raised concerns about the project’s decision-making process and transparency at the most sensitive moment of its fundraising.

For backers, the sequencing matters. A refund offered pro-rata before a token generation event is a partial exit at best, and it does nothing for participants who wanted exposure to a Hyperliquid-adjacent product specifically. The industry has seen platform-pivot controversies before, but rarely so soon after a nine-figure-adjacent raise with the original thesis abandoned before launch.

What HIP-3 dependency means for the ecosystem

The episode is also a caution flag for the broader Hyperliquid builder economy. HIP-3 was designed to make deploying new perpetual markets permissionless but accountable, requiring builders to post slashable capital that aligns incentives. What Trove’s situation exposes is the concentration risk embedded in that design: when a builder’s market depends on a liquidity partner controlling the required stake, that partner’s exit can unwind an entire roadmap overnight.

Projects building atop the mechanism will likely need contractual protections around stake withdrawal, or diversified staking arrangements, to credibly promise investors that their capital maps to a durable strategy rather than a revocable partnership.

Solana gains, trust erodes

For Solana, the pivot is another data point in its renewed pull on DeFi development, adding a funded perpetuals team to an ecosystem already competing aggressively for derivatives volume. But the manner of the arrival, mid-sale, under pressure, and with refund demands pending, means Trove lands with its reputation already damaged.

The project now faces a narrow path: deliver a credible Solana perp DEX, process refunds cleanly and quickly, and rebuild community trust that the mixed messages eroded. Any further slippage, or ambiguity about who gets refunded and when, risks converting a platform pivot into a full governance crisis.

As of the announcement, Trove has not published a detailed refund schedule or final tokenomics for the Solana version, leaving backers holding commitments to a project whose chain, timeline, and capital structure are all now subject to revision. The episode will likely become a reference case for how launchpads, auditors, and legal advisors treat chain-specific ICO marketing, and whether fundraising documents need material-change clauses that trigger automatic refunds when a project abandons its original platform. Until Trove publishes concrete terms, every additional day of ambiguity will keep the refund chorus growing.