Media now moves faster than the systems that manage it. Contracts still crawl, rights splinter by territory, and transparency vanishes once a project crosses borders. MILC (Media Industry Licensing Content) steps in with a live, compliant marketplace that tokenizes and licenses IP in real time, making ownership traceable and enforceable across jurisdictions. It is the quiet plumbing behind a faster, fairer media economy, and it is already running. With new partnerships in the energy sector on the cusp of being announced, the marketplace is shifting from being a quiet deployment to a wider rollout that will set the tone for what comes next.
From Fragmented Rights to a Unified System
For decades, the industry’s biggest obstacle wasn’t creativity but fragmentation. A single piece of content could have different owners in different countries, buried in contracts that took months to negotiate. This slowed innovation and limited smaller creators who lacked the resources to navigate that complexity.
MILC’s Rights Marketplace eliminates those inefficiencies. It converts intellectual property into digital tokens that represent actual legal rights. These tokens can be traded, licensed, or fractionalized, giving creators new paths to fund and distribute their work. Smart contracts replace endless back-and-forth negotiations, enabling cross-border deals to finalize in hours rather than months.
This model is already operational. According to the company’s investor memorandum, the Rights Marketplace manages an IP library worth about €30 million, with €15 million from its Series B round directed toward further expansion. That combination of scale and structure allows creators to compete globally without losing control of their work.
Also, by anchoring each transaction on-chain, MILC ensures that ownership, royalties, and licensing history remain transparent. The platform supports fiat and crypto payments while maintaining compliance with European frameworks such as MiCA and GDPR. These legal underpinnings make MILC’s system more than a technical upgrade; they make it a working model for the digital economy.
“MILC is the infrastructure layer where immersive content lives, evolves, and, crucially, earns,” MILC Founder and CEO Hendrik Hey says. “We are not just building a platform; we are architecting the protocol that will power the immersive content economies of the next decade.”
Redefining Ownership and Monetization
Traditional licensing models concentrate power in the hands of intermediaries. Creators, who generate the content that drives value, often see the smallest return. MILC reverses that dynamic. Tokens issued on the Marketplace represent enforceable rights that can be sold, licensed, or traded directly.
A filmmaker can tokenize a series and sell fractional rights to investors. A music label can distribute tracks globally with smart contracts ensuring automatic royalty payments. Independent studios can negotiate directly with streaming services without waiting for multiple layers of approval.
This framework also supports a transparent secondary market. Once tokenized, rights can be resold or re-licensed, with on-chain data guaranteeing accuracy in payment and provenance. The system removes human error from royalty reporting and replaces audits with automated verification.
Industry forecasts suggest that the global intellectual property licensing market will grow from $340 billion in 2024 to $580 billion by 2030. Even a modest portion of that market could translate into major value for platforms capable of managing tokenized rights at scale.
The platform is already enabling partnerships across Europe and beyond. Independent producers who once faced licensing bottlenecks can now access audiences faster. Investors have clearer visibility into ownership, while creators gain direct participation in the financial life of their work.
Beyond Media: Building the Digital Backbone for Global Infrastructure
Over the past year, MILC has begun extending its model into energy, education, and enterprise applications. Its Web3 infrastructure now powers digital simulations and decentralized licensing frameworks for partners seeking ways to make data and ownership interoperable across industries. This evolution marks MILC’s transformation from a media platform into a cross-sector standard.
Europe provides fertile ground for that growth. Regulations such as MiCA, the AI Act, and GDPR offer the clarity needed to attract institutional partners. Hey often notes that innovation thrives when it aligns with compliance rather than avoiding it. Clear rules encourage collaboration and foster trust, two essential conditions for any network designed to operate across borders.
While media remains MILC’s foundation, its reach is quietly expanding. The company’s ongoing collaboration with the ION Power Grid Association is one example of that direction. Through this partnership, MILC’s blockchain infrastructure supports a decentralized energy network that connects producers and consumers in real time.
The protocol introduces the ION-P token, a token built to manage energy exchange in a transparent and autonomous way. It allows individuals and companies to participate directly in how power is generated and distributed.
MILC’s work with on-chain licensing is feeding into a set of energy collaborations with ION-P that aim to scale clean power like a product. The pieces involve modular generation and tokenized settlement inside MILC’s simulation stack, all pointed at industrial demand. Details are under wraps, but the partners are sizable, the scope is global, and the plan is to show how low-carbon electricity can be produced, priced, and delivered with the same transparency that now governs MILC’s rights marketplace.
As MILC continues to scale, its infrastructure is being positioned as a backbone for the broader Web3 economy. Tokenized rights management, smart contracts, and transparent monetization models are no longer niche ideas. They are becoming the framework through which industries organize digital ownership.
The groundwork has been laid. The infrastructure is running. The partnerships are forming. The next chapter is already in motion.
About MILC
Hendrik Hey is the Founder of MILC (Media Industry Licensing Content), a pioneering company in the blockchain and metaverse space, with a strong background in media and content. MILC operates a real-life metaverse platform that serves not only the media industry but also various industrial use cases. The company also focuses on Web3 consulting, aiming to support complex real-world industries on their way into Web3. MILC is a sister company of European media giant Welt der Wunder, which Hey founded over 25 years ago.
