So who mined those 12k blocks before the announcement?
If you go to our discord server you can see the whole history of the coin. Friday at 9am the blockchain started. We updated xmr stak for our new algorithm and brainstormed for a few hours on what we wanted to do with the launch. At 3pm we posted links in other discord servers and started getting our first members to join in. When that happened we were roughly on block 1550. So we had mined 1550 blocks (~6500 coins) before we made our first announcement. By 4:35pm we had 30 members join our discord that were not part of the team. That is roughly block 2110 which is about another ~2400 coins. By this time there was more hashrate on our coin from new members than from the current team by a decent amount. By 6:46pm we were up to 50 members that didn't include the team. That is about block 3100, which is another ~4300 coins. By now almost all of the hashrate is from newcomers. Difficulty is up to 43820 from 7055 and 2683 before that. We had 190 members when we finally posted our ann, we were originally not going to post one as we were having a hugely successful launch already but community members asked us to. When we finally posted our ann we were on block 12400 and already had a nethash of 300kh and rising fast. We could have easily mined a ton of coins before giving out our discord link, or had a premine but we chose not to as we were looking to create a clean coin, one that will never charge you governance fees or look for your donations to do work on it. Every coin that was mined by the devs for the first day or two is being given away as bounties. We are giving away more than just the coins that were mined before we first gave out our link in other discord channels. We are giving away 3600 blocks worth of coins.
There was no ninja mine and we actually said on Saturday that anyone could post an ann for us if they wanted to. Nobody did so we finally did on Sunday when the community suggested we do so. Anyone can look through our discord history and the blockchain and see the history of the coin.