It's basically a cross-chain atomic swap with the EUR HTLC portion of it handled via a programable escrow account guaranteed to behave like and HTLC by the involved bank.
A blockchain viewer (showing most recent blocks) is in the works for the Betanet and should go live soon. Full chain explorer will follow for the feature-complete Testnet.
Because this one is built with one thing in mind: making it so simple that your mom can use it. Even the combined market cap of all Cryptocurrencies to date still only represents a small fraction of our financial transactions and monetary system (http://virtualrealitytimes.com/2017/05/30/chart-bitcoin-vers...). This is far from mainstream by any means. Nimiqs browser-based approach and clear focus on ease of use brings blockchain technology to everyone, everyday.
This is the Betanet. We will not use sha256 as in our Mainnet. We are already working on a WebAssembly implementation of a memory hard ASIC resistant POW.
Another example that reflects the spirit of what I believe graphenbeach is trying to say is similar to what some of the pharmaceutical and biotech companies (publicly traded inlcuded) are practicing every day: they perform research and invest very large amounts of money on matters that may or may not lead to a successful (not to mention FDA approved) outcome. Similar to a startup that risks VC, the small chance of a massive payback is what makes this approach attractive to investors & stakeholders. A company like Apple could easily pursue what would be nothing more than a 'diversification' of their otherwise seemingly very conservative financial strategy by going after one or two such high risk high reward projects.
Speaking on a tangent. Has anybody not found it annoying that you can't auto-BCC yourself in Gmail? Only if you do so does it pull up the message thread to the top which I prefer to keep track of timelines. I would be fine without the BCC as long as the thread reflects my response time. Either way, room for improvement.