Key points to remember
- NEM’s Harlock hard fork was announced today.
- NEM nodes will vote on whether or not to merge into a symbol substring.
- NEM is known to pioneer the “proof of importance” consensus mechanism.
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NEM has announced its Harlock hard fork, which it says “will decide the future of #NEM”. The hard fork will allow voting on the integration of NEM into the Symbol blockchain.
Rigid fork x7
Harlock will allow nodes to vote on whether they support NEM become a dedicated sub-chain of Symbol, an enterprise blockchain launched by the NEM project in March 2021. NEM nodes will vote whether or not the NEM blockchain will merge in Symbol as “substring” or “a transaction-specific type of side chain”.
Symbol was launched earlier this year, and the vision of its founders has grown since:
“… Sub-chains will be the pinnacle of innovation: not just Symbol, but the larger blockchain space. We are already planning to collaborate with other channels on research and development, and we envision a future where other cryptocurrency projects will be introduced as dedicated symbol substrings, providing new kinds of logic and transaction across the entire platform.
The Harlock update represents the seventh hard fork of NEM–historically, about one in every few hundred thousand blocks. The last hard fork occurred at a block height of 1,250,000 and represented a change in network charges. Harlock should run at a block height of 3,464,800.
NEM (New economy movement) was a first crypto project, launched in the first quarter of 2015. Its native cryptocurrency is XEM. This was important in Japan since 2016, seeing the adoption and acceptance of businesses as a payment method in restaurants and hotels. According to NEM, it has also “inspired art exhibitions and community-run cafes and even fundraising campaigns.”
The project maintains that its most important contribution is its proof of importance consensus mechanism (rather than, say, proof of stake or proof of work), which seeks to “deter the concentration of wealth commonly associated with proof of stake”. It does this by rewarding chain activities, such as transfers, in addition to offering rewards based simply on the amount acquired.
NEM’s XEM responds to the news. At the time of writing, it is up around 7% on the day, with trading volume rising around 330%.
Disclaimer: At the time of writing, the author of this article owned BTC, ETH, and several other cryptocurrencies.
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