The project raised $10M and then gave 100% of it away to open source projects. They receive some HNS tokens in return. There is a massive airdrop of coins to hundreds of thousands of guthub users, spreading out the money supply to people who might be the most interested in using the system. In other words, this is the least ICO-y new blockchain in a decade.

Names roll out over 52 weeks: HashName(name) % 52 = week number that a name is available. So that should attenuate squatting. Also bidding on names locks up coins for something like 2 weeks, so it's hard to bid on too many names.