What is NEM? — Coin of the Week: XEM
NEM [XEM]
New Economy Movement (NEM) is an enterprise-grade solution to power the impending blockchain economy, focusing on creating a smart asset blockchain which could effectively work under heavy workloads. Originally NEM was intended to be a fork of NXT, but the community decided to go with a completely new code. The alpha release was launched on June 25, 2014 and the full version was launched on March 31, 2015.
NEM introduced many novel aspects to the world of blockchain, such as its Proof-of-Importance (POI) algorithm, multi-signature accounts and encrypted messaging.
NEM’s Proof-of-Importance is similar to the Proof-of-Stake protocol. There are no miners in POI, instead there are harvesters, who are given an importance score based on the amount of NEM they hold and how much they contribute to the network.
NEM has two different blockchains; one is a public blockchain that can currently handle only around 2 transactions per second, and the other one is a private blockchain that can process up to 4000 transactions per second. The private blockchain called Mijin is used for testing, but during 2018 NEM’s public blockchain will have an update called “Catapult” that will introduce the speed of the private blockchain to the public chain, making it over 2000x’s faster than the current version.
Interesting facts:
· The idea behind NEM was started by a Bitcointalk forum user called UtopianFuture, and the developers of NEM are keeping themselves pseudonymous.
· The launch of the currency was not a smooth road. People who held the NEMstake asset or signed up to Bitcointalk forum to receive their coins did not receive them. Instead the coins were kept by the developers.
· To run a booted and synchronized node a harvester must hold at least 10,000 NEM.
· At the start of 2018, over $500 million in NEM was stolen from a Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck.
Whitepapers and documents: https://docs.nem.io/en
Website: https://nem.io/
Coinmarketcap: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/nem
