World class and bleeding edge in Blockchain technology design. Most promising indeed!
Most blockchains still have a single-tiered network where the wallet and server are one in the same at the core level. The original NEM architecture was one of the first to efficiently design and utilize a two-tiered network, and now Catapult is the first ever announced network using three.
As Jaguar, the lead dev working on Catapult told me, older blockchains scale linearly, one server serves only a certain amount of clients. The new Catapult system scales exponentially as one server can feed into many API servers and the those in turn feed into many clients.
This is what the blockchain should have been in the first place. Satoshi was a visionary legalist, philosopher, and economist, not so much a great network designer or coder and Bitcoin and other 1.0 chains have been dealing with problems ever since.
Expect Catapult to have the most advanced and easiest to use APIs of any blockchain. This will make us an attractive option for 3rd parties to build on.
Scales exponentially! It sounds like the devs are building a brain.
Neuron network activity scales exponentially with synapse density.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19104141"These results suggest that the brain's information processing capability gains more from increasing connectivity of the processing units than
increasing processing units, much as Internet information flow increases much faster than the linear number of nodes and connections."
Maybe one day the NEM ecosystem will become self-aware.
NEM is leading the way in blockchain technology, while others are still trying to figure it out.
https://scalingbitcoin.org/milan2016/Microsoft also has a project called Catapult.
Microsoft Bets Its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip
https://www.wired.com/2016/09/microsoft-bets-future-chip-reprogram-fly/