Numerai is an attempt to create artificial intelligence that can predict cryptocurrency markets. It does this by creating tournaments that anyone can participate in, and rewards NMR (tradable token) to the artificial intelligence that makes the most earnings. This is survival of the fittest, but for artificial intelligence. NMR was not funded by an ICO, with NMR being only available to participants ( data scientists).
Recently they announced that due to the value of the NMR going up astronomically, the prize money for each tournament has gotten to a ridiculous state (akin to 10 Netflix prizes).
Quote from their latest post (https://forum.numer.ai/t/the-new-numerai-economy/347)
"But an overnight 666-fold increase in payouts because of the release of Numeraire is not without downside.
The payout increase also incentivizes unaligned activity such as trying to decrypt our data to gain an edge, breaking our rules on multiple accounts, or even hacking our website. Success in these unaligned activities is now also rewarded significantly more, and we aren’t ready for this new threat model."
Whilst more money going into a project is good, whats happening here also shows the dangers of too MUCH money.