Today, we're proud to announce that Millicent Labs has awarded grant funding from the Arbitrum Foundation to support the launch of Millicent One, a public Ethereum Rollup to improve issuance and enhance the composability of tokenized Real World Assets (RWAs) and currencies within compliant on-chain financial services.

We're making this announcement from Basel, Switzerland where we've spent the past few days at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) headquarters for their invitation-only Innovation Summit, where global policymakers, senior executives from the finance and technology sectors, and leading academics gathered to explore how technological advances are creating 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 our digital cross-border payment system, we’ve chosen this moment to unveil the next step in our 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 us to leverage Arbitrum’s best-in-class Nitro codebase as a foundation for Millicent One’s 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 recently 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.”

More information and major announcements around Millicent One will follow over the coming weeks — make sure you subscribe to stay up to date with the latest news!

Today, we're proud to announce that Millicent Labs has awarded grant funding from the Arbitrum Foundation to support the launch of Millicent One, a public Ethereum Rollup to improve issuance and enhance the composability of tokenized Real World Assets (RWAs) and currencies within compliant on-chain financial services.

We're making this announcement from Basel, Switzerland where we've spent the past few days at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) headquarters for their invitation-only Innovation Summit, where global policymakers, senior executives from the finance and technology sectors, and leading academics gathered to explore how technological advances are creating 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 our digital cross-border payment system, we’ve chosen this moment to unveil the next step in our 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 us to leverage Arbitrum’s best-in-class Nitro codebase as a foundation for Millicent One’s 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 recently 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.”

More information and major announcements around Millicent One will follow over the coming weeks — make sure you subscribe to stay up to date with the latest news!