NEM Foundation Reshuffle’s to Bear the ‘Crypto Winter’

On January 31st 2019 the newly elected NEM Foundation made a public address to their supporters, investors and community. The nature of their address was somewhat of a mixed bag of emotions due to the challenging nature of the current so-called ‘crypto-winter’, and the affect it has had on the NEM Foundation.

As with all cryptocurrency projects at the moment, the XEM coin (NEM’s native token) has seen a drastic drop in value as a result of the current bear market. This drastic price drop has affected the way in which the NEM Foundation (the organisation tasked with developing the NEM blockchain) is able to complete its goals, hence the reshuffle.

What does this mean?

If you are simply a holder of the XEM token this information shouldn’t mean all that much to you, generally speaking. The team behind the NEM Foundation still intends to make good on their promises regarding technical development and enterprise adoption, they simply need to change the way in which they plan to do it.

The most notable changes to the NEM Foundation (beyond the switch up in personnel) are the fact that they have decided to change the methodology of their management from being marketing oriented, and that they have reduced their budget burn rate by 60%. Due to the nature of decentralisation the marketing oriented approach has lead to an inefficient use of time and funds, this has lead the foundation to move to a product oriented approach.

As a result all employees of the NEM Foundation will report to the head of a product team opposed to the head of a geographical team. The purpose of this is to efficiently provide more accurate data reporting, leading to further transparency.

The dwindling price of the XEM coin (along with all other cryptocurrencies) has meant that, for the foundation to complete its goals (and still be able to eat), they need to use more XEM to achieve the same goals, thus slowing the rate of burn makes perfect sense. The worrying aspect of this information is that the foundation literally only has 1 month’s budget left.

This has lead to the halting of proceedings while a workable, and accurate, budget is calculated and released to the public.

It could be a lot worse

While this news may come as a bit of a kick in the genitals to token holders and developers I, personally, think there needs to be a bit of appreciation for the way in which the team have handled this. Let’s face it, numerous cryptocurrency projects have shut up shop and disappeared during this bear market and NEM have reassured everyone that they are continuing to move ahead.

The fact is that this was always going to be a testing period which shake’s the dead wood from the metaphorical blockchain tree. We should all praise the NEM Foundation for being entirely honest and continuing to work on achieving their goals.

Happiness.

Go to official announcement