How can locking around 69500/200000000 tokens would protect its price? Bounty hunters has far less than 1% of all circulating supply.
Of course hunters are not "project supporters" anymore. Because no one want to support the project, that does not keep their promises.
At work, if the boss decides to lock your salary and give you 1/30 of it daily (saying he will protect your money, because you might accidentally spend a lot), would you still work hard?
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Calculate bounty pool by yourself and answer yourself, do bounty hunters really capable do dump the price to $0.01 ? If they can do that - then this Nominex if worthless, if this can be done so easily. If I were an investor, I would be happy to buy cheap token from bounty hunters.
Somehow you are calculating the max supply and not the circulating supply. That's not how math works. And original plans changed in many ways. First they were supposed to burn unsold tokens. This however wouldn't have solved lack of liquidity. I can't remember how much they sold in their "ico" or what ever it was called, but there was disproportionately way too much bounty tokens compared to sold ones if i recall correctly. Price would have been crushed from the start so they decided to lock bounty tokens.
DeFi farming was created to save the price and reward the liquidity providers, and those guys would have been most likely scared away from the start when people would have instantly either sold everything or mass sold their 50% to get usdt for farming.