NEM, short for the New Economy Movement, is an open-source, public, enterprise-grade blockchain with smart contract functionality to power the fintech revolution powered by digital currencies. To become the “NASDAQ of the new economy,” the NEM Foundation - the organization responsible for developing and maintaining the project, provides its technology to businesses looking to adopt decentralized applications (dApps) on its infrastructure.
The blockchain allows users to create their own tokens on its platform, called mosaics. These mosaics can be given any utility their creators wish - from being a store of value, medium of transfer, governance tokens, and more.
NEM originated due to a hard fork from the NXT blockchain in March 2015. While NXT was focused on providing an open-source cryptocurrency and decentralized payment network, NEM has more versatility as it supports smart contracts and can host dApps.
The NEM Foundation later created another blockchain called Symbol (XYM), which focused on enterprise-level distributed ledger technology applications. After launching Symbol, the NEM Foundation set up The NEM Group Trust with NEM’s NIS1 funds.
XEM is the native cryptocurrency of the NEM ecosystem. The proprietary token is used to pay transaction fees when using the network and doubles up as a governance token for the platform.