Originally launched in March 2015, NEM is based on a newer technology that uses a centralized blockchain similar to DASH. It was coded and designed from the ground up for scale and speed. NEM is currently trading at around $1.4 and is the 7th largest cryptocurrency according to the market cap.

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One of the concepts that makes NEM unique is the fact that it doesn't have any miners; it has what they call "harvesters". When NEM was originally launched, all the coins were distributed to members and then the members distributed them amongst their community and the only way to earn NEM is by processing transactions. The transaction fees are paid to the people that are running the supernodes or the centralized blockchain. It takes about 100x less electricity to send a NEM payment than it does a Bitcoin payment. With Bitcoin the coins have to be mined and the mining takes a lot of power and as the difficulty increases we need faster computers and even more power. That's great in terms of security but as far as efficiency is concerned, NEM is a winner.

NEM has one of the lowest transaction fees; it costs about $0.10 to send $1000. NEM is also not inflationary at all because all of the coins have been distributed so there's no way to add to the supply. This means that if the demand increases, the price will continue to increase. It has an inbuilt messaging capability which is nice though you get charged tiny fractions of a percent to use the service. It takes around 6 seconds for a payment to appear in a wallet and around 20 seconds to confirm. It's been proven to that it can to handle up to 300 transactions per second making it a much more scalable solution.

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NEM uses a permissioned private blockchain so it's definitely not for the privacy advocates. There is also some politics around this, as there are those who consider private blockchains that do not use any proof of work (that is, blockchains with no mining) to not be blockchains at all, but simply shared ledgers.
From its use cases it can be easily deduced NEM is made to be a direct competition to PayPal, Vinmo, Visa e.t.c. which when compared to NEM has transaction fees 100x more expensive.

You're probably wondering how decisions are made on this network since there are no miners and nobody is making more of these coins. They use what's called proof of importance which is very similar to proof of stake. If you're a supernode you're able to take part in the voting process and the more coins you earn, the more votes you're able to use. The idea behind this is that the development of the cryptocurrency will be in its best interest because if you own a lot of XEM you're going to vote for changes that help it continue to increase in value. You wouldn't want to hold a lot of XEM and make terrible or shortsighted decisions.
In order to start harvesting you need around 10,000 XEM and 3,000,000 to become a supernode. Once you start harvesting you get part of the transaction fees so in essence you sort of become what would be a bank in a normal brick & mortar situation. It's profitable because you're not using electricity or have all the overheads like financial institutions do.

CONCLUSION

NEM looks to solve a lot of problems that bitcoin has. It came along a long while after bitcoin so it definitely was able to address the scalability issues and seems to be working well. I currently am not vested in NEM because I think there are a lot of projects out there that are taking on so many hard problems while it's just more of a functional coin and not incredibly innovative. NEM is sort of sitting in the middle while we transition to more revolutionary technologies.

Thanks for reading..

Disclaimer: This post should not be taken as, and is not intended to provide, investment advice. Please perform your due diligence before investing in any cryptocurrency.