A new consensus mechanism called POI which is affected by an accounts stake and reputation in the economy.
First ever P2P time sync of nodes. (great for security of the chain)
First use of the Eigentrust++ as a security clustering algorithm so nodes can give reputation in to their neighbors in clusters, making it very difficult for a node to give false information consistently to the network. (great for security of the network)
First use of remote (proxy mining) harvesting, where by another person’s node can be used to form blocks for your account. All done safely and that other node doesn’t ever get to see any of the fee rewards even though it was the one that pushed the block to the network. (great for security of the user)
A new kind of transaction spam that. It targets the specific accounts doing the spamming and raises their transaction fees, while letting the global transaction fee rate stay low. (good for the chain)
First blockchain with a multisig 2.0 protocol. NEM’s version of multisig doesn’t make new accounts for a multisig address, instead it takes an existing account and makes a contract over it with other accounts. This form of multi-user accounts can make any form of M of N with ease and can also can have the M or the N edited with ease as it is simply just updating the meta data of the blockchain based contract. This form of multisig also has block chain based notifications so transactions or updates of the M of N are pushed to the wallets as transactions to sign. (great security and ease of use for the user. simply the easiest and most flexible multisig in crypto)
NEM also has many other features that it was not first, but are still important.
Messaging, which can be done unencrypted/encrypted/hex. (great for users and programmers)
A token feature where accounts can hash data to receive a token for proof of existence.
Any wallet may interact with any node on the network safely. (wow!)
A large and fairly even distribution. (This ultimately leads to much better marketcap)
Mosaics, the most advanced token creation feature in crypto allowing many advanced 2.0 features when creating personalized blockchain based tokens such as mutable, immutable, capped, not capped, divisible, not divisible, ability to be bagged with other tokens, levies, are already coded and someday more features like smart contracts inside of tokens and so on. (great for businesses)
A long with this, NEM will also release its new naming service, Namespace, that should also be the most advanced and most integrated naming service of any blockchain. (great for reputation)
We have our mobile apps which are in late stage of development and will be open sourced. This will allow third party devs to fork them and build their own applications on them.
A light wallet that can easily be adapted by third party devs as it is pure js/css.
Soon to release Node Rewards.
And… EASY to use universal APIs. This means it is a great platform for businesses to build their applications on. Here is an example. The NEM faucet is actually a multisig distributed faucet, probably the first of its kind. It filters for addresses, amounts, frequency, and has things like daily limits. And since the operations of the faucet are split up across multiple separated nodes which only communicate via the blockchain, it makes it very hard to hack or steal from.