Veteran crypto squad NEM Grouping has appear the successful launch of its Symbol mainnet.

Co-ordinate to a March 17 declaration, NEM now comprises a "two concatenation ecosystem," with NEM's existing NEM NIS1 concatenation continuing to operate alongside Symbol.

Symbol's launch wasn't entirely smooth sailing, with the mainnet going alive two days late.

Despite the team announcing the launch would be delayed due to the need to investigate unexpected node behavior amid its pre-mainnet rollout, sponsored posts celebrating Symbol'due south launch were prematurely published past a number of crypto media outlets.

The result preventing Symbol's launch was identified within 24 hours, with NEM announcing on March 16 that a "network config issue" had resulted in its pre-mainnet forking on startup.

NEM describes Symbol every bit an interoperable Proof-of-Stake blockchain designed to support asset tokenization, including financial, physical, and intellectual assets. Assets created on Symbol are given unique identifiers — assuasive conditional programming for tokens to be enforced at a protocol level. Symbol besides supports both public and private deployments.

Symbol's native XYM token is being airdropped to holders of NEM'south native token, XEM, at a one-to-one ratio according to balance snapshots as of March 12 — with vii.3 billion tokens from its almost 9 billion max supply beingness allocated to XEM holders.

While the deadline for pre-snapshot opt-ins for the airdrop expired on Jan. 9, XEM holders will be able to merits their tokens for upwardly to 6 years subsequently Symbol'south mainnet launch.

Opportunistic investors looking to greenbacks-in on the airdrop appear to have driven a trigger-happy pump and dump in the XEM markets, with the token gaining 250% from $0.23 at the kickoff of Feb to $0.8 on March 4.

Nevertheless, most of the gains were short-lived, with XEM having retraced back to $0.half dozen by March 12, before tanking back downward to $0.33 over the side by side three days. As of this writing, XEM last changed hands for $0.37.

NEM/USD, 90-day chart: CoinGecko

XYM is currently trading for $0.4, a roughly 8% premium over NEM, suggesting that Symbol is the 31st-largest crypto nugget by market cap, ranking above FTX Token and below IOTA, co-ordinate to CoinGecko/

The NEM NIS1 blockchain showtime launched in 2014, and was the first concatenation to support on-chain multi-signature wallets. Symbol expands on this functionality by allowing the signatory of multi-sig accounts to also incorporate multi-signature accounts with unique co-signers.

"This allows users to simplify the creation of circuitous signature requirements, which streamlines business organization processes such every bit payroll," NEM said in an announcement.