I have been looking at many platform coins to invest and since I am looking at Ethereum, a friend has suggested for me to look at NEM project which has XEM tokens. The NEM features are really good as they have POI (Proof of Importance) instead of POW (Proof of Work) which would be a waste of energy and money. They have other cool features such as NCC and NIS which allows for separation of wallet and server.
They also allow the creation of private or permissioned blockchain which traditional companies can use to improve their own existing database systems saving a lot of money. This is where I start to question the decentralised nature of the NEM Project. There are only two companies in the world that provides this service and this is Tech Bureau in Japan and Dragonfly in Singapore. Shouldn't this Mijin private chain technology be open to other developers if they were really a decentralised project?
In Ethereum, there is a vast community of programmers in their ecosystem who can create such solutions. It seems like NEM (XEM) is a public project to gain the support of the masses before the owners of Tech Bureau and Dragonfly cashes in on public support by selling access to a private chain technology to the highest bidder.
I am a decentralisation purist and I really don't think a project that is structured to benefit the few will act in the interest of the community and the world. Their intentions are clear - if they were honest, they would open the private chain technology to the world. I also read about how the NEM project wants to sue a famous former developer, Makoto. The reason is because Makoto with his new company Soramitsu has won a contract with an Asian Central Bank.
If you are a customer, when you sign up to a NEM private blockchain project, you are at their mercy, paying their license fees annually and you don't have a method to escape should you decide to move on.
If you are a fellow developer or an entrepreneur with an idea, when you give your ideas to Tech Bureau and Dragonfly, there is no guarantee they will run away with you idea. The final decision is in their hands and they will squeeze you for every penny.
If you are an investor, there is no telling when the NEM Developers with their huge amount of XEMs will manipulate the markets and even dump and run away with your money.
This project is definitely not worth the extremely high valuations ( as much as USD 1 billion) which has been given by the market. The features of the project and the community is great, but at the fundamental level, there is a corruption of the ethos of de-centralisation. Beware of this project!