NEM Group Ltd. announced Monday the launch of a new enterprise-facing distributed ledger blockchain platform named Symbol designed for programmability and security.

Symbol uses a blockchain technology known as proof-of-stake. That’s where a collaborative algorithm sets the next block based on a set of randomized and incentivized peers depending on how many coins they hold and how long they’ve held them, signaling their “stake” in the blockchain’s longevity.

With this launch also comes XYM, which is the native currency Symbol uses for transactions on the NEM platform network.

“Symbol’s feature-rich platform makes it suitable for a number of industries and use cases, spanning the enterprise, financial services, regulated asset and wider blockchain spaces,” said NEM Chief Executive David Shaw. “We believe we are at the start of an entirely new economic and digital system that is more inclusive and accessible. Symbol is uniquely positioned at the forefront of the movement towards decentralization, digitization and tokenization.”

Symbol from NEM is designed for interoperability and can support both public blockchains and private or permissioned models, and cross-chain swapping. As a result, its application programming interfaces easily integrate with existing processes.

It also permits the creation of special-purpose digital assets, such as tokens that can represent shares stock, securities, signatures, votes, nonfungible tokens, physical objects such as within a supply chain, or other currencies. These assets have their own configurable properties that can be programmed, as well as enforceable logic-based asset-based restrictions and permissions at a protocol level.

All that, says the company, makes Symbol ideal for highly regulated industries such as decentralized finance, regulated assets and security token offerings – as well as healthcare, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, aerospace and other applications that require complex signature propositions and programmability in supply chains.

“As a flexible platform, Symbol’s application programming interfaces can be seamlessly integrated by existing enterprise systems and processes, as well as other blockchains,” said Kristy-Leigh Minehan, chief technology officer at NEM. “Its multilayer technology stack allows for trustless, peer-to-peer, multiparty asset swaps, escrows or trades.”

The technology is currently in use by the Bank of Lithuania for LBCOIN, which NEM claims is the world’s first blockchain-based digital collector’s coin issued by a central bank. LBCOIN was initially issued using NEM NIS1 public chain on July 2020 with 4,000 LBCOIN, equivalent to 24,000 digital tokens and 4,000 physical collector coins.

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