Era coins (TimesCoin, referred to TMC) is a BTC38.com introduced virtual computing unit, free of charge to all users. 

BTC38 decided to give out 50% of their transaction fee as a dividend to people holding TimesCoins. It's a different way of funding, you could see it as a shares sell, so they produced 16 million TMC and sold it to their users. Now each user that holds TMC gets a % of the trading fees applied by BTC38. For example is there are 20 BTC generated in one day in trading fees on their platform, 10 BTC are kept by the company and another 10 BTC get divided to the owners of TMC. At the moment there are 5 million TM in circulation so if you own 500.000, you would get 10% of 10 BTC, so you would get 1 BTC at the end of the day, assuming the trading fees for that day were 20 BTC.