I will admit that the substance of your post is thought-provoking fillippone.

Is sponsoring an ICO or some similar level of involvement in some kind of shitshow an automatic death knell to bitcoin street cred?

I am thinking about it.. there are likely degrees shit and scam and deception - and I had not known anything about INX.LTD prior to your post, so I have only looked at the links that you provided, and on the surface (much beyond my paygrade) it does NOT look like anything beyond a scam-project...

.....not that we like to go into any details of possible scam products in this thread because it would either only invite possible defenders (like a slippery-slope in to shitcoin talk), and just sharing details likely causes a lot of pain for the regular WO thread followers to follow..

Maybe starting a thread on the topic, might be better... to help devolution from happening too muchie in this thread, and it is not really a bad topic idea, just as you outlined (and defended your idea(s), as a starting point) in your post.