Maidsafe had almost no presence on the net a few months ago, it was some obscure vaporeware project. Suddenly, out of nowhere, they annouced some coin and received millions in hours until it was partially closed.
Someone invested 900 BTC ($450K) in one transaction alone. Based on what? No photos and stuff copied from freenet? No escrow? No marketing?
Something there doesn't pass the smell test.
Especially since mastercoin has pretty much no future anyway.
I would not say it a vaporware before I can read all their GibHub repo and white papers. David (MaidSafe founder) was in Inside Bitcoin in early April and made a tour to some research university, Google development group before that. As I understand the project has been backed by BitAngel at least for 1 year, hence the estimated 2.5 million$ backing up to now. You can bet that the person who put 900BTC in probably read codes and white papers before.
It would be pretty naive to think that they can go ahead with type of deal without at least 1 or 2 huge backers pre-committed to a certain amount. Compared to other types of Bitcoin ecosystem venture deals such as Coinbase, Circle, Bitpay etc. the amount raised here is pretty normal for the amount of works and the project's potential.
I have a theory of why they do this kind of quick IPO without much fanfare but anyway it doesn't really relate to the actual potential of the project which is determined wholly by the technology itself.