Australia’s leading blockchain company, Blockchain Global has today announced it is set to power the first dedicated cryptocurrency exchange platform for the NEM Foundation. The exchange will be built exclusively for the NEM cryptocurrency (XEM), which has a market share of USD $1.4 billion and is currently the sixth most valuable blockchain token in the world. The partnership between the organizations was first announced last month and the exchange is the initial development of the collaboration’s expansion plan.
Lon Wong, President of NEM Foundation said:
“This NEM exchange is the world’s first cryptocurrency exchange of its kind and we’re looking forward to working with Blockchain Global to build it.”
“With the global cryptocurrency ecosystem bursting at the seams, we want to make sure businesses using NEM’s smart asset offering are not set back by the inability of global cryptocurrency exchanges keep up with demand.”
The NEM exchange will be built by white-labeling the technology powering Blockchain Global’s Australian Cryptocurrency Exchange (ACX), which is Australia’s largest bitcoin exchange by volume, with over AUD $600 million bitcoins traded to date.
In one year, ACX had rapidly grown to dominate 70% of Australia’s bitcoin exchange market share by offering customers deep liquidity, competitive prices, and no trading fees when buying and selling bitcoins.
Sam Lee, CEO of Blockchain Global said:
“There is no one else in Australia building cryptocurrency exchanges, and this partnership places us at the forefront of Australia’s fintech innovation in this cryptocurrency space.”
“We’re excited for NEM to leverage our exchange, Blockchain IP and know-how to spearhead the development of this platform with more cryptocurrency exchanges to follow.”
While bitcoin, with about 45% market share of the global $110 billion cryptocurrency market cap, is the most commonly traded cryptocurrency, this exchange will instead feature the XEM currency with more cryptocurrencies to follow, allowing NEM Foundation to take control of developing their smart asset offering.
William Saunders, Business Development Manager from Blockchain Global said:
“We hope this cutting-edge NEM Exchange will pave the way for more world-leading cryptocurrencies to take control of their future with their own cryptocurrency trading platforms.”
The NEM Foundation is expected to spend around USD $40 million in the next year to fund its global expansion programs and is allocating USD $5 million towards supporting blockchain companies. These companies will be incubated in the new Blockchain Center co-working space in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, recently opened as an initiative of the NEM Foundation and Blockchain Global.
Lon Wong, President of the NEM Foundation provided CryptoNinjas with more insight into the launch of the NEM dedicated exchange:
If you could in a few sentences describe what makes NEM’s blockchain technology different, what would you say?
“Bitcoin is just a stored value, it hasn’t got much utility beyond that. If you’re talking about Ripple, it’s a very application specific technology in terms of its more for correspondent banking. And when you look at Ethereum it is a world computer system, which is basically a network of machines that is set up to execute programming code and business logic.”
“NEM, on the other hand, is a blockchain technology that enables transaction in a more enhanced and better-featured solution as opposed to what Bitcoin, Ripple, and Ethereum offer.”
The exchange plans not to offer fiat gateways, but is the idea to get XEM to be used as a more liquid judge of value, like BTC and ETH act as sort of reserve currencies for the crypto-sphere?
“We are not introducing the fiat gateway because one day we think that a fiat pegged crypto could be easily designed to be traded on our exchange so therefore the fiat gateway is no more relevant when you could actually use a fiat pegged and or backed currency on our exchange.”
Which assets will initially be listed on the exchange?
“BTC, XEM and it is hoped that ETH could be part of it as well initially.”
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