The NEM, the New Economy Movement, is a platform for asset and data management. It was introduced in 2015 and initially came to existence as a fork of the NXT network, however, a unique NEM code was created later on. The project was created by a number of participants from the Bitcointalk forum. The NEM network was founded with a goal to expand cryptocurrency’s usability beyond just being a payment method, becoming a platform that would support everything blockchain related.
The team behind NEM refers to such a network as Smart Asset System (SAS). The said system allows users to create different types of digital systems on the NEM network, including tokens, custom infrastructures, or even security systems. XEM, the native token of the network, acts as a governance token and can be used to reward harvesters for transaction validation. XEM mining can be performed in two modes — a local and a delegated one. In the first case, the user's online client is launched with the provision of a private key for the multi-signature of a block, — and in the case of delegated mining, the remote intermediary client with a zero balance is launched.
In March of 2021, the NEM network launched an open-source blockchain platform titled Symbol. The Symbol network was created with the goal to link business and blockchain by reducing process complexity, paving the way for new business models.