Millicent Labs, a leader in blockchain-based financial infrastructures, announced today it has secured grant funding from the Arbitrum Foundation to support the launch of Millicent One, a public Ethereum Rollup to improve the issuance and composability of tokenized Real World Assets (RWAs) and currencies within compliant on-chain financial services.
BASEL, SWITZERLAND / ACCESSWIRE / May 9, 2024 / This announcement aligns with the conclusion of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Summit, where global policymakers, senior executives from the finance and technology sectors, and leading academics gathered to explore how technological advances can create new opportunities for a more open, interconnected, and user-centric global financial system.
As a participant in multiple BIS Innovation Hub initiatives and recognized by the G20 for its digital cross-border payment system, Millicent Labs has chosen this moment to unveil the next step in its roadmap to combine the best features of decentralized finance innovations with mainstream financial services: Millicent One.
Millicent One is designed as a public unified ledger - a comprehensive digital platform for seamless, efficient, and instantaneous payment, clearing, and settlement across a diverse range of assets and currencies.
The platform will integrate tokenized RWAs with various forms of tokenized sovereign currencies - including commercial bank deposits, e-money, stablecoins, and central bank assets - employing zero-knowledge cryptography for privacy-preserving identity and compliance solutions.
In addition to grant funding, the Arbitrum Orbit program enables Millicent to leverage Arbitrum's best-in-class Nitro codebase as a foundation for Millicent One's highly-scalable, fully-customized chain with the ability for granular controls over parameters including privacy, permissions, fees and gas tokens.
Millicent Labs' selection of the Nitro stack follows an extensive ecosystem evaluation process, noting that Arbitrum is not only the leading Ethereum scaling technology, but also of rapidly growing importance in the RWA space - underscored by the Arbitrum DAO's Stable Treasury Endowment Program (STEP), which has attracted interest from major financial institutions like $1.5tn AUM asset manager, Franklin Templeton; Libeara, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Standard Chartered Bank; and Securitize, who presented BlackRock's $381mm tokenized fund, BUIDL.
Kene Ezeji-Okoye, Co-Founder and CEO of Millicent Labs, said, "Today's announcement marks another significant milestone in our journey, with recognition from another highly-respected industry leader. We are thrilled to be building with the support of a world-class organization like the Arbitrum Foundation."
Nina Rong, Head of Ecosystem Development at the Arbitrum Foundation, said, "From securing UK government funding to their involvement in the BIS and Bank of England's Project Rosalind, Millicent Labs continues to showcase a commitment to enhancing mainstream financial services through public blockchain technology. We are excited to welcome such a pioneering team into the Arbitrum ecosystem."
About Millicent Labs
London-based Millicent Labs is an award-winning innovator in digital finance with support from some of the world's most prominent firms across both traditional and decentralized finance. Named one of the UK's top startups, the company is committed to breaking down silos and transforming the global financial system into an open and interconnected digital network benefiting stakeholders on all sides by combining the safeguards of today's financial system with the exponential advantages of highly interoperable distributed ledgers.
About The Arbitrum Foundation
The Arbitrum Foundation supports and grows the Arbitrum network and its community with secure scaling solutions for Ethereum. Arbitrum One-a leading Ethereum Layer-2 scaling solution initially developed by Offchain Labs-offers the fastest, low-cost transactions with security derived from Ethereum through Optimistic Rollup technology. Launched in August 2021, the Arbitrum One mainnet beta is EVM-compatible to the bytecode level and has 54%+ TVL in the L2 segment. 2000+ DeFi and NFT projects are live in the ecosystem to date. In August 2022, Arbitrum One upgraded to Nitro tech stack, enabling fraud proofs over the core engine of Geth compiled to WASM.
For more information visit: https://www.millicent.io/
Press Contact: Manon Pendan, Millicent Labs [email protected]
SOURCE: Millicent Labs