The world’s current financial infrastructure is still rooted in a bygone paper-based era. Even the most modern FinTech platforms feature a slick user interface, hampered in the backend by piece of a decades old core banking system.
Times have changed, and traditional finance’s long-standing inefficiencies are no longer acceptable. The world has shifted into a borderless, cashless, and interconnected society. The people demand open, instant, secure, and low-cost transactions.
Millicent Network was designed for this.
Millicent Network is a distributed financial system designed to bridge the safeguards and liquidity of today's financial system with the exponential benefits of blockchain technology
Built with the Cosmos SDK and designed to become a vital part of the “Internet of Blockchains,” Millicent Network unites a powerful decentralised network with fungible, regulator-friendly digital currencies: stable value, liquid asset-backed tokens that can be used both on-chain and in everyday life, finally delivering the promised benefits of digital currencies to the world at large.
Backed by funding from the UK government, Millicent intends to lay a universal foundation for the future of global finance by overcoming the major obstacles faced by both legacy financial systems and other DLT networks, namely:
Scalability
Millicent Network is able to process thousands of transactions per second with 2 second finality and ultra-low network fees, and is also designed for horizontal scaling though the use of sovereign zones - independent blockchains arranged in a 'hub and spoke' model.
Interoperability
Imagine a scenario in which you couldn’t easily send an email from Gmail to Hotmail, Yahoo, or any other provider.
That’s precisely the conundrum that both traditional finance and much of the blockchain space currently find themselves in, and this lack of interoperability leads to additional fees, delays, and attack vectors.
Leveraging Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC), Millicent Network is built to connect to major public and enterprise blockchain networks, as well as integrating with legacy financial systems via custom banking middleware, allowing any legacy financial institution to instantly become blockchain-native and able to issue fungible, programmable, digital money.
For the first time, this creates a universal financial system, where money can easily flow not only across borders but between on-chain and off-chain realities.
Stable-Value Currencies
The same volatility that makes cryptocurrencies a popular speculative asset also renders them a poor choice for everyday life.
It’s likely that you wouldn’t be very happy spending $10,000 worth of Bitcoin on a car, only to see the price of Bitcoin double the next day.
Worse still, imagine a merchant who relies on their sales income to pay staff, pay rent, and order the next month’s worth of stock seeing the purchasing power of their assets fall by 50% overnight, leaving them unable to pay their bills.
Millicent's digital currencies are created to merge blockchain's speed, cost, availability and utility benefits with the price stability required by the sound money required to underpin real world economies.
Safety
While digital currencies are almost undoubtedly the future of money, they don’t always come without drawbacks.
Various stablecoin designs bring varied risk profiles, and inhibit fungibility - the interchangeability of one asset for another, in the same way that a £5 banknote is equal to £5 in a Lloyds or Revolut account.
More worrying, if any component of the stablecoins’ backing does not correctly function, the stablecoin can become unpegged and crash, sometimes all the way to zero.
In contrast to many designs, digital currencies on the Millicent Network assure both safety and transparency, as they are fully backed by liquid reserves issued and held by regulated institution s— to become adopted for everyday use, this is crucial.
Adding Full-Reserve Digital Currencies as a proxy for central bank money, enables instant, atomic, on-chain settlement, mitigating many forms of risk.
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This is just the tip of the iceberg for what Millicent has planned, and we’re really looking forward to sharing our journey with you.
