A Letter from Lon Wong
Expanding the Ecosystem, Assuring Growth
As we forge ahead in the fourth year of NEM, I want to share with you a few thoughts about our future and how important this project is to me. It has always been my desire to ensure that NEM succeeds. By any measure, NEM has succeeded although our journey together has witnessed many trials and tribulations. But one thing has remained constant and that is my commitment to building the best ecosystem for NEM. I have always given my all to NEM by working full time from its inception when XEM began its modest life at USD0.00017 per coin.
In the past year, we have seen tremendous growth in the value of XEM that coincided with the establishment and expansion of the NEM Foundation. I am proud to serve as our foundation’s founding president and oversee its expansion throughout the world. NEM, via our foundation, enjoys the distinction of being the first crypto project to set up its own blockchain center. This center represents a significant achievement and demonstrates the cohesiveness of the project team to come together on a global scale to dream big. To be entrusted the opportunity to lead this wonderful community and team, has been both a privilege and an honor for me.
Catapult has just launched, and soon its open source version for the private chain will be released. Preparation of the public chain will follow soon and I have high hopes that Catapult will be another major success, at which time, we should be recognized as a world leader. I continue to believe that it is critical for NEM to have a large ecosystem that goes beyond what blockchain can do with value transactions and transfers. Our superior technology should be expanded to the hilt to include and cover industries at large.
Very early on, before the launch of NEM, one of the things I thought we should do was to create some form of an integrated solution with a solid abstraction layer sitting on the NEM public chain and a distributed file management system. However, there were more urgent matters to attend to and this idea was put in the back burner.
Many of you would have seen the recent official announcement of the inception of ProximaX as a project. Allow me to clarify what ProximaX is. This project is meant to enlarge the ecosystem of NEM. It is by no means a competitor to NEM. ProximaX was built to increase the utility of XEM. The creation of XPX, the crypto coin of ProximaX, is itself a mosaic on the NEM blockchain with XEM as its transaction fee. It is in fact a demonstration of how powerful NEM is and how expansive projects can be powered by the NEM blockchain. If there is widescale adoption of ProximaX, NEM will definitely benefit as it requires more XEM for transactions. ProximaX and NEM are symbiotic and the ecosystem shall increase greatly in breadth and depth of utility.
Our NEM.io Foundation has been blessed with a group of able leaders and enthusiastic fulltime employees that stand ready to take the world by storm. We have built momentum and I am happy with the way things are moving. So, after careful consideration, I have decided that it is time for me to step aside as the President of NEM.io Foundation and concentrate my energy to build ProximaX and continue to grow the NEM ecosystem.
NEM’s future is bright and I believe the best is yet to come. I urge all of you to continue the great support you have been giving to build our ecosystem and support the work of our colleagues at NEM.io Foundation. I will certainly be doing my part. You have my word that everything I do in the future will continue to benefit NEM.
Thank you,
Lon Wong
