Thank you all for waiting so long for news and being patient.   

As was said all along, NEM devs have been hard at work behind the scenes.  Major deals and advancements in blokchain technology don't happen overnight.  For the last few months a rewrite of NEM into C++ with many modifications has been taking place.  We are happy to announce that the project is coming along well and is ready for an official announcement. 

As a part of the partnership with Mijin, NEM is exploring a unique blockchain model, one of a tightly integrated public/private chain, with one Core team building for both at the same time.  We hope that this will help us to gather the interest of businesses and apps that need a blockchain with a lot of options.  Whatever they need, we will try to make it possible. 

We also expect that this news will help to bring NEM into the spotlight more and give it more attention (that we believe it deserves).

The new Catapult engine is being built for security and scalability as well as ease of use to build on.  We expect it to be awesome.  NEM developers are taking everything they learnt from writing NEM and doing it all over again, but better all around.

With this news the NEM devs have left their old jobs and are now officially full time paid developers working on NEM/Mijin.  And with that move I need not point out that there are just a few other chains with full time paid developers, bringing NEM is the same category such as Ethereum and Bitcoin.