Key Takeaways
- MILC has grown from a media licensing platform into a full Web3 infrastructure covering content, music, AI, and streaming, all live and generating revenue.
- MILC’s expansion into music reframes it as infrastructure, enabling automated rights attribution and payments whenever content is used across its ecosystem.
- The Digital Genesis Fund brings MILC into a regulated Luxembourg investment structure, providing an institutional-grade framework for scaling Web3 infrastructure.
When most blockchain projects were collapsing under regulatory pressure and market downturns, MILC (Media Industry Licensing Content) was doing something different. It kept building. The company, founded by German media veteran Hendrik Hey, operates a live metaverse marketplace processing real transactions for media companies, brands, and developers. It has expanded into AI-powered music and rights infrastructure, decentralized streaming, and a regulated Luxembourg investment fund that gives institutional investors a way into Web3 without the legal uncertainty that has kept most of them on the sidelines.
MILC started as a solution to a problem that Hey understood from three decades in European broadcast television. Content moves instantly across borders, but the systems that track ownership and pay creators remain stuck in an earlier era. Royalty statements arrive late. Licensing deals require armies of lawyers. Value leaks to middlemen at every step. MILC automates those broken processes using blockchain, encoding ownership and revenue splits directly into digital assets so payments happen automatically when content is used.
The Company Is Live and Growing
MILC has received more than 20 million euros in financing for technology, software development, and creator tools. A content library valued at approximately 35 million euros serves as an asset anchor, separating MILC from the vaporware that characterized much of the Web3 boom.
MILC functions as a persistent three-dimensional environment where intellectual property can be tokenized, licensed, and traded in real time. Creators, publishers, brands, and developers coexist within a shared infrastructure that handles everything from content creation to revenue distribution.
The creator economy now exceeds 300 billion dollars in market volume, but traditional systems continue to fail the people who actually make things. MILC addresses this directly. The infrastructure treats ownership as programmable data rather than paperwork, which means rights travel with the content and payments happen at the point of use.
The company is GDPR and MiCAR compliant, allowing it to operate within European regulatory frameworks without the legal ambiguity that has paralyzed American Web3 projects. That compliance matters because institutional investors have avoided the space because they could not explain speculative token projects to their compliance departments. MILC offers something they can actually underwrite.
Music as Infrastructure
MILC has expanded into music, but not in the way most people expect. This is not about streaming royalties or playlist algorithms. Music, in the MILC ecosystem, is infrastructure.
The company has partnered with a studio holding more than 70 patents in adaptive and generative music systems, developed in collaboration with Queen Mary University of London. The result is a patent-protected music IP layer covering film, series, games, and immersive formats. Rights attribution happens automatically the moment a piece of music is used anywhere within the ecosystem. A composer does not need to know that their work appeared in a game released across fourteen countries. The system already knows, and it already paid them.
This kind of infrastructure has never existed before. Musicians have fought for control over their own work for decades. The technology to make that happen finally exists. Ownership information is stamped directly onto each music file using blockchain technology, so payments are made automatically whenever the file is used. Creators stop waiting months for money that may never arrive.
“This must be what it felt like when the first Hollywood pioneers built their studios and set a new era of storytelling in motion,” says Hendrik Hey. “Today, we find ourselves at a similar turning point, but this time, the canvas is infinite: a three-dimensional, transparent, and interactive metaverse.”
The Digital Genesis Fund
MILC is also the anchor investment in the Digital Genesis Fund, a Luxembourg SICAV-RAIF launched with 55 million euros in assets and a governance structure built for institutional capital. The Fund operates under the same alternative investment rules that govern private equity and hedge funds across Europe. Governance sits with 6 Monks as AIFM, Q Securities S.A. as Depositary, Ernst & Young handling the audit, and DLA Piper on legal structuring.
The Fund operates as a multi-compartment vehicle, meaning each investment area is legally and economically separate from the others. MILC handles media. Additional compartments are planned for Energy Tech, Automotive and Mobility, Real-World Assets, and AI and Data Infrastructure. The investment pipeline includes targets across production, streaming, AI, compute infrastructure, and rights governance. Each target generates independent revenue today and stands to benefit from integration with the broader MILC infrastructure.
For investors who watched the Web2 era from the sidelines as apps like YouTube and TikTok reshaped global markets, this structure offers something earlier blockchain ventures could not provide: a regulated path in from the beginning.
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 live 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. For more visit: https://www.milc.global/.
