NEM is among the largest digital currencies in the market today. While the likes of Ethereum were going through the DAO war, another industry entrant was being designed. NEM is a creation of several Japanese banks testing the possibility of a new blockchain payment structure.
Launched in 2015, NEM stands for New Economy Movement and the first to introduce the Proof of Importance (PoI) mechanism in the cryptocurrency industry. The idea was to reward user who contributed to the NEM community. It encourages users to participate under the proof-of-stake program.
According to the NEM founders, the goal of the network is to address the issue of wealth inequality in the society. This is an area where other cryptocurrencies have failed to address; this is the essence of New Economy Movement (NEM). The NEM program is written in java script and the unit of trade is the XEM. It is therefore a movement of creating an economic model in a decentralized environment for economic equality and financial freedom.
Their unique features include the proof-of-importance protocol which includes various NEM account holds. This is the concept of math clustering where pages are ranked under net transfers and the much spent on a monthly basis.
The other feature is the vested amount of XEM under the cluster codes. This feature looks into interlinked accounts and their cluster activity. These are weight slightly heavily but ranked lower that the math clustering.
With NEM, creation of blocks is referred to as harvesting; when you create a block you earn some fee associated to the block crated. The importance of your account determines whether you qualify to be a harvester or not.
Your account must have both vested and unvested XEM balance at any given moment. Your eligibility to harvest block depends on vested and unvested XEM in your account balance. The more balance in your wallets; the more incentives you get, this also puts into consideration the number of transactions monthly.
When you send currency, XEM, the amount is taken from both vested and unvested balance. Consequently, when someone sends you XEM, it gets to your wallet as Unvested. You get rewarded for holding the currency hence discouraging rapid trade. The XEM algorithm discourages hoarding or any form of manipulation.
NEM has a system called node repopulation to take care of node attacks by malicious users. Nodes take care of each other; they update the trust value and synchronize themselves make the entire network to collude. This is how transactions are deemed authenticated and complete.
Simply put, the NEM network has features that empower the user. The user has control over their participation in the network. This results in every active community member benefiting from their participation in the system.