Hello NEM community,

My team and I just attended the Asia Blockchain Summit where we met the NEM marketing team. We had heard of NEM before, obviously, but but had not considered developing on the chain because of the relatively low txps compared to other existing chains such as Stratis. However, after meeting with Nelson Valero, who was representing NEM at the conference we were persuaded to take a closer look at NEM as a platform for developing our project. As a simple test to compare NEM support to the other chains we were considering, I went home and sent out messages to the three chains in our top list. It was extremely encouraging that the NEM team responded within a few hours, connecting us with real people, not outsourced managers, who forwarded us straight away with the people we needed to know in order to continue our study of NEM.

It has been 24 hrs and the other two chains have still not given us a satisfactory response. Support is extremely important for the success of a project developed on any platform, so far NEM has scored a 10/10 for us. It is quite encouraging to see that the decentralized organisation of NEM is vastly superior to the centralized approaches of our now “runner-up” chains. We are currently reviewing our own business structure to see if a more decentralized approach can give us improved efficiency, as well as reviewing our project to establish whether or not we can modify it to still be possible to implement using XEM as our global currency rather than using our own custom native token.

I am very impressed from what I have seen from the NEM community so far and encouraged by the fact that the crypto mania does not seem to be prevalent here. Many of the projects going to vote for support are seeking reasonable funding, and getting it, without having ICO’s with unbalanced sales practices that are hurting main street investors and the reputation of blockchain as a whole. I’m happy to become a part of the NEM community and do hope that what we see as we study the chain allows for the possibility of us using this platform both to raise startup capital, as well as implement our solution.

One thing that I would note from the outset is that many projects seem to be trying to use NEM as the sole source of their funding. We think this approach to be unlikely to be successful for these companies in the long term. Raising money is relatively easy, but funds raised from different groups each have a different implicit value attached to them. When projects choose to raise solely from the NEM DAOcommunity, they will find themselves with little to no support when launching in the real world due to the centralization of their fundraising process. When you have numerous funds invested, it gives many more groups skin in the game and they are also then applying their distinct resources, pushing together for the success of your project. Just some food for thought when considering funding for these projects. I look forward to getting to know the active community members here in the forum as well as the people in the meetups that may be taking place in Shanghai, where we are based.