NEM Foundation, on Brink of Bankruptcy, Plans Layoffs and Pivot

The NEM Foundation, a community-funded nonprofit established to promote the NEM blockchain, is planning layoffs across its entire 150-person staff in the wake of severe budget cuts and ahead of an imminent restructuring, CoinDesk has learned.

The newly elected president of the NEM Foundation, Alex Tinsman, told CoinDesk Wednesday the Singapore-based NEM Foundation now intends to submit a funding request to the NEM community fund for 160 million tokens, money that would be used to rescue the organization from the verge of bankruptcy.

NEM tokens are listed under the XEM ticker with a circulating supply of 9 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.

NEM's XEM token launched in 2015 under the guidance of former foundation president Lon Wong.

The cryptocurrency is primarily used for transaction and service fees on the NEM blockchain.

In the meantime, NEM pilot projects have often focused on use cases such as voting.

According to a longtime NEM user, a developer who asked to stay anonymous because he worked directly with departed leadership, Wong faltered when he used his visibility at the foundation to promote "Sketchy" initial coin offerings such as Ecobit and ProximaX. The ProximaX token sale reportedly raised more than $33 million in 2018 and the company's website lists Wong as the CEO. The anonymous developer said "The community felt this was a breach of faith," adding there is still a great deal of work to be done in order to encourage developers like himself to actually use the blockchain.

She said teams will be given specific budgets and required to perform more open-source documentation of their progress making tools for the NEM ecosystem.

Tinsman further plans to monetize the foundation's activities in 2019, including enterprise training and affiliate marketing, to reduce the nonprofit's reliance on community grants.

"It's really exciting to me that NEM has a strong suite of tools and a community that is moving forward to change the future. And now we can support them in meaningful ways."