The non-profit organization NEM Foundation, created to promote the NEM blockchain, reported a difficult financial situation, as well as plans to reduce staff and imminent restructuring.
Newly elected organization president Alex Tinsman (Alex Tinsman) said that the NEM Foundation plans to ask the NEM community to fund the organization for 160 million XEM tokens. This amount, which is about $ 7.5 million at the current rate, will be used to save the NEM Foundation from bankruptcy.
Note that XEM is the 18th largest cryptocurrency in the world, and its market capitalization is $ 424 million, according to the CoinMarketCap. To date, 9 billion XEM tokens have been released.
“In general terms, we realized that we could only exist for a month due to the wrong leadership of the previous board of directors,” said Tinsman.
More than two hundred members of the organization must vote on the request for funding. The number of reduced staff will be determined after it becomes clear how much funding the community will approve.
Recall that the launch of the XEM token, intended for payment of transaction and service commissions on the NEM blockchain, took place in 2015. At the same time, the full launch of the Catapult platform engine is planned only for June 2019.
“We reduced marketing activity because there’s no point advertising a project that hasn’t yet come out,” Tinsman said, adding that in the period from December 2017 to January 2019, the NEM Foundation spent 80 million XEM tokens on marketing.
As one of the main developers of the platform said, there is some “loss of faith” in their community. He noted that not many people work on the platform, and many developers are concentrated in Japan.
Tinsman announced that she plans to create a much more detailed roadmap for platform development in 2019. Each development team will receive a specific budget and will be required to maintain more detailed documentation on the development of tools for the NEM ecosystem. In addition, Tinsman plans to monetize various activities of the organization, for example, training courses and related marketing.
“I am very motivated by the fact that NEM has a powerful set of tools, and the community is constantly moving forward to change the future. And now we can support this community in the most useful way”, said the President of the NEM Foundation.
Note that at the end of last year, Ripple and NEM announced the creation of the association “Blockchain for Europe”, which will represent the interests of cryptocurrency and blockchain companies throughout the continent and position itself as “the first single voice for industry in Europe”.