Launched in March 2015, NEM (XEM) is one of the recent arrivals on the cypto currency scene. As such, it is something of an innovator too, having introduced new blockchain technology features, like proof-of-importance, a reputation system and encrypted messaging, among others.
NEM was inspired by Nxt, and it was essentially born on the Bitcointalk forums. A user there came up with the idea, and the contributors were mostly recruited there as well. The ambition of the creators was to come up with a new, community-focused crypto currency. At first, the idea was to use a fork of Nxt to create NEM, but later on, the decision was made to develop a completely new codebase.
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Though the stable version of the NEM network was launched in April 2015 as said above, development work never really stopped on the project. In 2016, Catapult, a C++ version of the code was created. Mijin, a commercial blockchain, also makes use of this technology. Mijin is under consideration by various private companies and financial institutions, in Japan and world-over.
The NEM architecture is focused on allowing small clients to operate, without needing a full NEM blockchain copy. A client-server solution is what makes this possible. What this also means is that while the NEM client is indeed open-source, the server side part is not. Catapult on the other hand is rumored to be made open-source.
NEM harvesting is how new currency units are created. Harvesters need to fulfill certain requirements, one of which is to possess some 10,000 XEM and to run a synchronized or booted node. Block processing time is one minute.
There’s a special, delegated harvesting feature available too, which is designed to allow people to request others to create blocks and process fees for them.
The current market cap of NEM is an impressive $1.23 billion.
