They found an elegant way to avoid premine & ICO : this is a two coin mecanism : siacoin and siafunds.
The siafunds has been sold to initial investors : they give right to have a percentage of the payment in siacoin of the storage contracts.
The siacoin are being produced by POW and are the money for the storage renting mecanism.
The one offering storage propose renting at some price on the network, the one searching for storage choose the best offer for his needs and pay in siacoin for a certain time.
A small fee of the renting payment goes to the siafunds holders.
The storage mecanism is in ealy beta stage.
This is true...
There was a SIAFUND ICO on NXT Asset Exchange about a year ago, to fund the team.
About 1600 or so of about 2000 were sold I think.
These remain in private hands - I know of only one sale for 1 fund at 2BTC, there may be others.
The fund gets 3.9% of all SUCCESSFUL i.e. paying out storage contracts.
A fund holder gets 1/10000th of this fee
The majority are held by Nebulous to give them an income/collateral for future investment it also establishes the teams motive to make Sia successful at storage.
All coin transaction fee's go to miners as expected.
The storage upload/retrieval does not depend on PoW but the consensus does.
Basically Sia has been a year in the making so far and if you look at the code you can see the work.
