Review on NEM by Saleh Bayramli

NEM became a forked version of NXT in March 2015. NXT is another popular blockchain-based virtual currency and payment network platform.

It is operated by a Singaporean non-profit organization called the NEM.io Foundation. After the fork, NEM.io decided to develop its own code base to advance NEM and make it more scalable and faster. Then a new NEM cryptocurrency platform appeared, which was completely different from the original NXT.

NEM has its own cryptocurrency, called XEM. Although merchants do not use XEM as a payment method like Bitcoin, the value of XEM has grown significantly and currently ranks 12th in cryptocurrency by market value.

NEM aims to build a "better" blockchain and tries to achieve this goal using two key concepts, Proof of Importance (POI) and aggregation.

Other cryptocurrency networks, such as Bitcoin, use proof-of-proof (POW) or proof-of-sale (POS) systems, which require mining equipment to run for the blockchain. Rewards are allocated to miners based on their labor contributions.

However, in POW, miners with higher processing/computing capabilities have undue advantages over those with less powerful machines. In addition, POW leads to higher energy consumption, which makes the process energy inefficient. In POS, coin hoarders have an inappropriate advantage because participants with more coins are more likely to obtain more coins through mining and transaction processing. It also promotes cryptocurrency savings instead of cryptocurrency spending.

NEM uses its PDI mechanism to solve this problem because it pays more attention to how much it has “invested” in the NEM system and the actual “vested” interests. The XEM coins in the wallet and the retention period play a key role in measuring importance.

A person needs to have 10,000 "acquired" XEMs in their wallet to be eligible to generate and earn new blocks and earn various transaction fees.

NEM provides the seamless ability to interact between public and private blockchains. It can easily transfer any digital assets, such as tokens, contracts or documents from a private internal business network, through a public blockchain, and finally transferred to another company's private network. Today, users cannot transfer money directly from their Paypal account to a Venmo account. As long as all relevant parties agree, NEM's private-to-public block link port can make this type of transfer possible.

NEM can handle everything: financial assets, contracts, documents and various digital assets.