First time I noticed eXch (which was years after they started), they had about $1M in reserves. Last time I checked them, it was $50M. The anonymous exchange business can be profitable, which means reserves grow quickly once people start using it.
I had the same feeling because their thread was created in 2014 but before the campaign launch day only 30 posts were published in it (at the time when the campaign was suspended the thread had 40,000 views and 1700 high-quality posts).
Although the reserves at that time were already about 1-2 m dollars (however, this is still 20 times less than when the project closed).