The NEM network launched on March 31st, 2015. We are pleased to announce that launch went as well as we could have hoped for, with no major problems with the network or clients.

At launch, Poloniex listed XEM and trading commenced immediately. XEM volume has been healthy and the price has been very stable, we believe, owing to NEM’s large distribution. We would like to thank everyone that participated, and encourage the community to help build NEM into a great platform. NEM is a long term project and many great projects are being planned to be built on top of the NEM platform; this is only the start. Although, the main devs, marketing and the NEM community in general have been very busy, we have quite a few announcements we would like to make.

Real utility from the beginning

It has been a great wish of ours to try to give NEM real life utility right from the beginning, so this is what we actually did. We have contacted a few payment processors and Coingateway appears to be a good choice as a gateway moving forward. With Coingateway you can use XEM to pay everywhere that Bitcoin is accepted. This means you can now use XEM to buy things on Overstock, Dell, and Microsoft, as well as at many more merchants directly, with the use of Coingateway. There are now more than 100,000 merchants accepting bitcoin worldwide and we are very happy to be able to allow every NEMber to use their XEM at more than 100,000 real world places right from the beginning. Please note that for the first month there will be a transaction limit of 5 BTC per transaction. Once the first month is over, depending on our transaction volume, the limit could be increased up to 25 BTC.

In addition to Poloniex, the NEM team has been in contact with Bittrex. They are already working on integrating NEM on their exchange and we will announce it as soon as it’s ready.

Thanks to “Crimi” (a bitcointalk.org user), we have a new node explorer at www.nodeexplorer.com. Crimi has set up an account for donation for his effort. You can tip him at the following address: NA5NCN-5AIKIP-X2UHD7-SVC7R5-YHGYLC-GNMEAN-SMDJ

The NEM team has been hard at work making tutorials to help you through any questions you may have about NEM: blog.nem.io/nem-tutorial-list. We have also moved the NEM overview page from the bitcointalk thread to the official NEM blog to be able to reach wider audiences and to update information even faster: blog.nem.io/overview.

Late redemption and sockpuppets appeal

For those who have missed their earlier round redemption and have waited patiently to redeem their tokens, they will be happy to know that Makoto has started work on extended redemption and that messages are being sent to the applicable people. More can be found here.

Furthermore, a sock puppet appeal deadline has been set for April 30th, 2015. Sock puppets will no longer be able to appeal past this deadline. As for those that have written to Makoto and Patmast3r and are awaiting an update, many will be relieved to know that the first batch of cleared socks is tentatively scheduled to be sent out on April 19th. Concerning further sock puppet updates, we understand that it is a very important matter to you and we are taking it quite seriously. Thank you for being patient in this matter while it is handled to the best of our ability.

PR and Media

NEM has started to gain media attention in both English and Chinese crypto communities. Just recently the following articles have been published.

Additionally, NEM values reaching new people outside of the crypto community. To that end, the marketing team has been planning for another marketing campaign with another press release to be published shortly. This is a good opportunity for NEM to be published in larger news outlets, where we can reach more people.

NEM Community Challenge

Our community plays an instrumental role in NEM. Thus, we would like to thank everyone that is participating and encourage the community to help build NEM into a great platform. As you all know, NEM is a long term project and for all the ambitious goals we have, we appreciate all the help we can get. This is why we are calling our community to action and challenge every NEM member with some specific tasks:

Conquer bitcointalk challenge: we are launching an intensive bitcointalk campaign in which for the next week, every NEM community member and investor is encouraged to find time and post every day, for seven days, in at least 5 - 10 threads of the altcoin section and beyond. These should be intelligent and constructive posts, linking discussion to NEM and letting people know that NEM has launched. Please note that we do not want to troll or spam the threads, but rather engage people in an intelligent and respectful manner.

Voting: We have also contacted some other exchanges and services directly which responded that their only procedure of listing coins is by voting for them - this is where we need your help. NEM has been listed on the voting pages of both hitbtc.com and cryptsy.com. In addition to that we have opened a feature request on cex.io in order to also get NEM listed there, please support NEM with your votes, because depending on the votes, we will receive an answer after one week of consideration: cex.io.

As everyone knows, it is important to be on many exchanges and for that reason, we need everyone in the community to vote for NEM. If everyone in our community votes, we will be in pole position in no time.

Thunderclap campaign: We are launching a NEM Thunderclap campaign and for this we need full support of the community in making this a reality. We need to reach 100 supporters in 2 weeks and once the deadline arrives and we have reached our goal of supporters, Thunderclap will send out a tweet or a facebook post on every account that is signed up. We expect to reach somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 people. We need full community support for this. A link will be posted once the campaign is approved so that everyone can help support our first thunderclap campaign.

An overview of what you can do for NEM can be found here.

Finally, we want to thank you for your help and support. Let’s come together and start spreading the word about NEM everywhere. NEM’s propagation starts with you!

The NEM team