In 2011, he got wrecked by a Bitcoin mining scam. In 2025, he's raising $1.75M to make sure it never happens to you. The founder story behind Ethos Network🧵👇

Back in the OG days, a young Trevor Thompson tried to mine Bitcoin with gear from Butterfly Labs.​ Like thousands of others, he never got the miner. Classic rug. He watched helplessly as his money vanished (FTC later shut them down for "unfair and deceptive practices").

Most builders just post tweets about scams. Trevor spent 13 years obsessed with crypto’s trust problem.​ Every rug, exploit, and new scam just brought that old loss back. "Grifters kept draining money… there was no accountability in the space."

After surviving the Butterfly Labs era, Trevor did not rage quit. He traded, farmed airdrops, spun up his own hedge fund and watched scam after scam. By 2023, new waves of SocialFi innovation (like friend .tech) offered no real guardrails even as billions were lost annually to fraud and hype.

So he teamed up with a fellow Atlassian builder and launched Ethos Network: A full-blown on-chain reputation system to finally keep score in crypto peer reviews, bonded trust, slashing scammers, decentralized and Sybil-resistant

"Ethos was born out of frustration with the rampant scams plaguing crypto." Now, 31k users, zero VCs, $1.75M raised from on-chain angels, and real credibility scores shaping real decisions in wallets, on OpenSea, and beyond

Ethos is just getting started. With every review, every vouch, every scam exposed, crypto gets harder to fake and easier to trust. Trevor imagined a Web3 where trust is default. Now it’s live.