Is it true that XEM has been initially distributed via Airdrop? There was no ICO, some private sale or similar?
Part of it was Airdrop. Part of it was 'given away' for a 'nominal donation' so read that as you will. But it wasn't like a typical ICO where you get more tokens the more money you put in - the initial NEM distribution was all based on Stakes and those were given to people in this forum based on unique usernames.
Who were the 5 lucky ones that got 4 725 000 206 XEM or 52,86% of the "airdrop" ?
What is the current circulating supply?
If CoinMarketScam (
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/nem/ ) is correct: 8 999 999 999 XEM, it's the most greedy PoS scam project ever, with only 61,363,334 XEM or 0.686% earned in almost 3.5 years.
Here you can see the final distribution statistics and explanation of the various funds nem has:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TKTIakxUEotmTN4Et80EI7d-8XifgFZ4aBUGAukgLfY/edit#And here is the rich list with the different fund addresses named:
https://nemnodes.org/richlist/Current rich list says nothing, 'cause it's too easy to redistribute the coins.
So, it's Sustainability Fund, Marketing Fund (Launch/V1 Reward), Operational Costs Fund I, Pre-V1 Fund & Post-V1 Fund.
And Sustainability Fund got about 24% or more than 1/3 of Stakeholder Community Distribution because of sock puppets and unclaimed stakes.
And who controls the above mentioned funds?
Too easy to redistribute the coins? Just use the blockchain explorer to verify what ever you need about the funds.
All the accounts are controlled by members of the nem team. They use nem's native multisig to ensure that nothing can be moved without at least 5 different people agreeing to do so.
If the devs wanted to scam people why didn't they exit in december when the combined funds were worth over 7 billion usd?