Also
Was Darkcoin Instamined?
~2mn coins were issued in the first 48 hours due to problems with the difficulty readjustment. That represents approximately 10-15% of the total money supply that will ever be issued.
That is some sort of semi-official "FAQ" (which overstates the amount of time taken for the instamine, but that's another story)
Finally, from the actual official dash site:
When we relaunched we had a rush of miners join causing a huge spike of coin production without it being able to adjust the difficulty quick enough, we just ended up spilling out coins. Retargeting happened every 576 blocks and could only increase the difficulty by four times, so it took about six retargets to get to a difficulty that was near 2.5 minutes per block.
Later on, after the difficulty evened out we realized that there was a serious problem with the block reward calculation. You can see people discussing the problems here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.120I soon fixed this issue at block 4500, but none of us realized the amount of coins that had been issued at the time. At that point we didn’t even have a block explorer yet.
There is no question that dash was instamined. Even supporters of the coin have given up denying it and instead claim it doesn't matter. We could argue that, but here is not the place to do so. Either way, it is 100% accurate to display it a such.