You slipped a digit... closer to 200,000 coins.  The coin was announced around block 3900 and mined by non-developers shortly thereafter.  Check the Twitter posts for a history.  With a maximum coin supply of 268,234,500 coins, that represents less than 1/10th of 1% of the coin supply.

As stated on the website, we did in fact spend months (over 1000 hours) testing on -testnet prior to starting mining on Mainnet.  But there is no way to generate valid checkpoint records on mainnet via testnet.  This was a small compromise to insure some chain stability.