NEM (New Economy Movement) is an ecosystem of platforms that use blockchain and cryptography to provide solutions for businesses and individuals. XEM is the native cryptocurrency of NEM’s NIS1 public blockchain.NIS1 operates in a similar way to Bitcoin (BTC): it has a network of distributed independent nodes that process and record transactions on a public ledger called “blockchain.” These nodes are incentivized to contribute their time and computing resources and remain incorruptible via transaction fee rewards; these rewards are paid out in XEM coins to each node that manages to add a new block of transactions to the end of the blockchain.However NIS1’s blockchain has a number of unique features that set it apart from Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies.The alpha version of NIS1 — or NEM as it was known at that time — was launched on June 25 2014 and its mainnet went live on March 31 2015.