What was the big deal about multisig anyway?
Im not sure why the devs wanted to add this before launch, I would have been happy to wait for it to be added later but it is a good feature, but i should also mention that there are other coins currently already using it.
1) devs will be in control of a huge amount of coins and do not want to risk holding them in regular accounts.. 1 hack = devs lose credibility and nem dies.
2) other coins do have multisig, but not blockchain based multisig. there is a MASSIVE difference.
3) the more skeptical investors, or risk averse, will feel much safer investing in Nem knowing they can secure their investment safely with multisig.
4) 3rd parties(exchanges, payment processors et al) will be able to use multisig to secure funds so we wont have any mtgox, bter, bitstamp [and so] type hacks which make the coin stolen look bad even though its nothing to do with the actual coin(most of the time). also we wont ever end up in the position of nxt having to think about a roll back to recover 5% worth of coins that got stolen.
having multisig ready for launch was the BEST move the devs could have made.
NXT is implementing their own blockchain based realization of multisig in v.1.6 - 1.7 (current v. is 1.4.x) of NRS called "two-phased transactions", which they say is "much more powerful".
about it on their official forum.