Hi NEMbers ,

Kristof Van de Reck here , currently interim president of NEM.io Foundation.

I’m 38 and live in Belgium with my wife and two kids

Back in late 2013 when Bitcoin had it’s price surge to 1k$ I got intrigued. I heard of Bitcoin before (somewhere in 2011) but only took it serious after realising it was still around two years later.

Fist of all I wanted to know how this system was secured and later I started looking into the economic aspect of having a currency that’s not backed by an underlying asset or government.

Although this caused a chain reaction of lightbulb moments, at that time I had no idea about the impact this would have on my life.

Back then I was working in aviation maintenance and my technical knowledge was limited to som VBA programming for MS Excel and Access I had no knowledge about public key cryptography and never even heard of a hashing algorithm before

The real game changer was when I came across a webpage where you could timestamp a document (hash) on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Now I realised the real invention was block chain ( back then it was written like that ) and I immediately saw the vast number of use cases for the technology, first of all in aviation maintenance as this was my area of expertise.

I didn’t like the energy consumption of POW so I started looking into the alternatives (Landscape at the time: https://coinmarketcap.com/historical/20131208/) and during my research on NXT I learned about NEM. I really liked the features and roadmap of NXT but their distribution was a big red flag so I started following the NEM thread on BTT. Early on you could really feel the energy in that thread and I liked the fact that NEM had a focus on blockchain rather than just cryptocurrency which was not obvious back then

Over the next years I kept following NEM closely but I was never very active because of time constraints. But the occasional private chat with some of the core team members became more frequent and when the community vote for setting up the foundation was initiated I decided it was a good time to get more involved.

I became one of the council members of the foundation and started working for NEM fulltime a couple months later.

The ever evolving blockchain landscape proved to be quite challenging. Between now and when the foundation was set up things have changed tremendously !

Business adoption is going much faster than expected ( mainly because of the crypto hype IMO ) and it’s really obvious that the landscape is becoming more mature every day.

With this knowledge in mind and looking at the future, it’s important for us to step up our game and come up with a long term game plan. If we want to position ourselves as one of the top contenders in the industry we need to have a clear strategy and continue to build the team that can execute on that, and that is exactly what we are doing.

Along with that, our main focus is on releasing NEM2 (Catapult) public chain.

Even though there were little changes on the NEM protocol over the past two years, everything else has evolved a lot ( wallets , explorer, node rewards, … ), as a result it requires a thorough assessment and plan to execute on.

Last but certainly not least; our team all over the world is overwhelmed with projects taking a serious look at NEM for their use-case. Just coping with that demand is already quite challenging but it proves we are making progress with adoption.

Until we can reveal more about our strategy and roadmaps we’ll continue working full speed in stealth mode. In the mean time I would love to communicate more with the community but unfortunately proper communication takes time and it would slow down the process.

Over the past year I have met numerous NEMbers all over the world and I’m looking forward to meeting more in the future !