The donations added up to approximately 1337 BTC, but this was back in 2015 and the expectation was that development would be a long process before getting on exchanges. It's completely new tech and those that put money into it were taking a much higher risk then people that are now buying the new hot token ICO's that they often flip shortly after for quick profits. (Ethereum ERC-20 tokens are just that, tokens, not Dapps. They are the promise of a dapp in tokenized form.) Using the original price as a metric will not accurately reflect whether the current price is "competitive" or not. You have to consider the many months of OTC sales and the risk to reward ratio.


It also helps to see exactly how much technological and business progress has been made in this time. It's quite substantial and in my humble opinion there is still quite a bit of upside to the market price of IOTA.

A great resource: http://www.tangleblog.com/


IOTA has not "come out of nowhere" as many seem to think. There has been several levels of price discovery over the last year and a half.