7 Coins in 7 Days: Day 1 NEM

NEM (XEM)

A friend of mine asked me to do the first 7 in 7 on NEM. I have no prior knowledge of the coin so I figured this would be the perfect place to start.

For a quick intro to this segment see my blog post here: https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@jrob238/7-coins-in-7-days-intro

Coinmarketcap

At the time of this writing, NEM is 10th on the CMC ratings with a valuation of 5.4 billion, sitting at roughly $0.60 per coin, with a $47 million 24h volume, and a total of just under 9 billion coins in circulation. I noticed two things right off. It has the second lowest 24h volume in the top 20 and why on earth did they not let loose one more freaking coin to get an even 9 billion. The second could be an OCD issue. It's circulating supply is pretty large, although not the largest. I know some people only like low supply coins. I usually keep this in mind depending on the use of the coin.
Website - https://nem.io/
The NEM website is very well designed with no major errors glaring out. Information is laid out in a way that makes it easy to find. I learned NEM has its own blockchain that they created from scratch, they call it "the smart asset blockchain". Its main function is to adapt existing businesses databases with the blockchain. The video on the home page claims that it can be adapted to work on any platform. Another interesting thing I saw was that you could create your own coin on their blockchain. There is a lot of specific use examples that if you are interested I suggest using the link above to view.
Whitepaper - https://nem.io/wp-content/themes/nem/files/NEM_techRef.pdf
The NEM whitepaper is pretty interesting. Their ideas of where they want to take crypto are inspiring. The most interesting thing I found was their Proof of Importance concept.

NEM’s primary contribution to the cryptocurrency landscape is a new consensus mechanism
called Proof of Importance (PoI). Unlike Proof of Work (PoW), it is environmentally
sustainable and does not require large-scale computing resources in perpetuity. PoI
is similar to Proof of Stake (PoS) except that it is not solely derived from the size of an
account’s balance. It incorporates other behaviors that are believed to be positive for the
holistic economy. In this way, it attempts to reward active economy participants at the
expense of inactive ones and dampens the rich getting richer effect that is inherent to
PoS.

Number of Exchanges

NEM is listing on most of the popular exchanges like HitBTC and Bittrex. I was a little upset to find that it is not on Binance or Kucoin, two of my personal favorite. Overall I think it's easy enough to obtain.

Chart

The chart looks fairly like you would expect. It seems to rise and fall with the BTC price without much deviation. For me, I like this. I am constantly keeping up with BTC charts so it makes it a little easier to predict.

News
Little did I know the first coin I would write about was recently involved in one of the biggest hacks in crypto history. How I missed this news is beyond me. (see why I needed the blog)

According to CoinDesk:

Some 500 million XEM were stolen from Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck last week in what some observers have called the largest exchange hack to date.

This is not news I would really like to see when looking to invest in a coin. On the upside, NEM is working and tracking the accounts of the hackers and seem to have a pretty good idea of where all the coins are. Another positive is that this was an attack on the exchange, not NEM, and the value of the coin seemed unharmed during the process.

Final thoughts
I like the technology NEM has created. I can see it be used and it definitely has a place in the future of things. The price fluctuation recently seems to be due to the bearish market we are currently in and doesn't worry me too much. I think it could be a good time to buy in and see what happens. This would probably be a coin I would go in at a smaller position and HODL. That said I need to learn more about their PoI system and see how I can earn tokens instead of buying them. Do I think you should invest in NEM? I'm no financial advisor.