Mintware

1/8 🔶 Meet the teams showcasing at Demo Day After 11 weeks of intense building, mentorship, 1:1 advisory, & constant iteration, the cohort is ready to unveil what they’ve built. Meet the BTCFi Accelerator 2025 cohort, powered by @ventures_core, ready to take the stage 🧵👇

1/8 🔶 Over the last 11 weeks, the BTC-Fi Accelerator powered by @ventures_core didn't just support through mentorship & workshops; it transformed early-stage builders into market-ready teams. Here's what Weeks 5–11 looked like as we sprint toward Demo Day on March 12 🧵👇

🤡 The Central Circus @TroveMarkets - Devs Showing Signs of SCAM 🔷 Built on Hyperliquid but Launching Token on Solana? - They started with a testnet on HyperEVM and successfully drew in the community for the ICO, but then the Trove devs made this super confusing move: constantly delaying refunds and deciding to launch the token on SOLANA instead. - If that's not hilarious enough, check out how the devs are using the money raised from the ICO. 🔷 ZachXBT Exposes Dev Team Using ICO Funds to Deposit into Casino Sites - And the KOL Booking Scheme Comes Out - After the announcement, ZachXBT asked the team why they were sending ICO money to casino platforms, and the team claimed it was probably @_TJRTrades - a KOL who's into gambling. - Notably, this account had previously posted a super obvious shill for buying $TROVE. => So there's proof the team booked KOLs with huge amounts of cash. - After checking the addresses, a bunch of KOLs got exposed, like @waleswoosh - a KOL who's often at the top on Kaito, who got $8k to blatantly shill the TROVE ICO. => What's really messed up is that this KOL didn't even add an ad tag or warn users. => They're treating their followers like products to sell for profit. - KOLs who put the TROVE logo in their names got up to $5k a month, plus the perk of buying $TROVE at just 50% of the community price. => Taking ads isn't wrong, but if you don't disclose it, it's easy to overhype and cause the community to lose money. Especially investing in projects like TROVE. 🔷 The Game's Over - $HYPE Getting Dumped - The TROVE team bought 500k $HYPE to build community trust and prove they'd use HIP-3 (which requires staking 500k $HYPE). - But right after the ICO sold out, the team started gradually selling off those $HYPE tokens, raising suspicions that the project is a slow rug. You can check it here: #spot" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">hypurrscan.io/address/0xebe0… 🔷 Personal Experience - Lessons Learned - When I see KOLs blatantly shilling an ICO deal like this, I usually stay away. - Deals that are super easy to buy into and win often aren't worth it. - Don't trust KOLs on X, especially anonymous accounts. They don't care if you lose money; they only care about how much your follow is worth to them. Source: @5phutcrypto_