NEM Launches New Enterprise-Grade Blockchain Platform

According to the company’s announcement, the Symbol Mainnet officially went live on 17 March, and will run alongside NEM’s NIS1 blockchain. The platform’s 15 March launch was delayed by a network configuration issue during the deployment of the pre-mainnet. After the issue was identified and fixed, the network auto recovered from a fork and was finally released.

David Shaw, the CEO of NEM Group, said that the release of Symbol is the culmination of over four years of building and testing.

“We have taken the learnings from the NEM NIS1 public network, and considered what individuals and businesses are looking for in a blockchain solution,” he explained in the company’s press release.

The enterprise-focused platform will enable users to create specialized digital assets with configurable properties and a unique identifier. Symbol will also be interoperable, its APIs enabling users to easily integrate it both with existing systems and processes and other blockchain platforms. Kristy-Leigh Minehan, the CTO of NEM Software, explained the platform was developed to be customizable and has over 120 different configuration settings.

As the network will run in parallel to the NIS1 blockchain, the release of Symbol will make NEM a two-chain system. While NEM NIS1 will cater mostly to developers, Symbol will be used to drive blockchain adoption by targeting businesses and enterprises.