NEM was started by a Bitcoin Talk forum user called UtopianFuture who was inspired by Nxt. The initial plan for NEM was to create a fork of NXT, but this was eventually dismissed in favor of a completely new codebase. Starting on January 19, 2014, an open call for participation began on the Bitcointalk forum. The goal of the call was to create a community-oriented cryptocurrency from the ground up.
In April 2016, Tech Bureau, the operator one of Japan’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Zaif, formed a partnership with NEM for a new blockchain engine.
On 26 January 2018, Japanese cryptocurrency exchange Coincheck was the victim of a massive hack resulting in a loss of 523 million XEM coins, the native token of NEM, worth approximately $400 million. The hack only involved NEM, because the security breach was caused by the lack of strong security measures of Coincheck with regards to their implementation of NEM, lacking the use of multisignature support or a cold wallet[citation needed]. The NEM #DevelopmentTeam refused to conduct a hard fork. Instead NEM is created an automated tagging system. This automated system followed the money and tagged any account that received tainted money\ The result of these actions was that NEM stopped tracking the stolen coins approximately mid-March 2018, after concluding that enough data was provided to the law enforcement authorities.