Heard about this on slack. Great way to even further expand the community! I didn't catch where the funds were originating from. I assumed it was through token slated for dev costs?
No, it actually comes from generous community members and members of the "ecosystem club".
They recognized the potential and acted accordingly.
That's exactly what good investors do!
Everything came from the community, there was no premine, not 1 Iota was allocated to the devs. The community donated close to 5% of total Iota supply to Foundation long after ICO. The core dev team bought all of there Iota during ICO.