Cryptocurrency project NEM announced a seismic shift in its strategy due to financial difficulties. Over the year, the rate of the cryptocurrency collapsed 43 fold.

On the verge of bankruptcy

The NEM Foundation, which stands behind the NEM cryptocurrency, reported serious financial problems due to the long-term bear market. The Singapore-based company decided to radically reduce its staff, which now accounts for about 150 persons.

Optimization will lead to rearrangements within the managing team and transition from the organization focused on promotion to the one focused on its product.

The new management of the fund, which took over the previous council, proposed to ask the NEM community for financial aid. In this way, the fund hopes to attract 160 million NEM (XEM) tokens, equivalent to approximately $7.5 million, said NEM Foundation President Alex Tinsman, who was elected to this post in November substituting its former president, Lon Wong.

“Basically we realized we had a month to operate, due to the mismanagement of the previous governance council,” Tinsman said.

According to her, under Wong, there was an irrational waste of the foundation’s budget. Since December 2017, the foundation has spent about 80 million XEM tokens, mainly on marketing purposes.

“We’ve reduced marketing activities because it doesn’t make sense to market a product [Catapult] that isn’t out yet,” Tinsman added.

Hackers and drop in rate

A large amount of cryptocurrency NEM was stolen by cybercriminals in January 2018, when the Japanese exchange Coincheck was cracked. Then the hackers managed to steal about 500 million XEM tokens worth $520–530 million as of the day of the hacker attack.

Since then, the NEM price fell more than 40 fold. Now it is trading at $0.04 and continues to go down.