# Hendrik Hey Is Betting Europe Can Win the Web3 Race Silicon Valley Walked Away From

> A German media veteran who built television networks for three decades is now building a metaverse marketplace on the argument that Europe's regulatory clarity is an advantage, not a burden.

- Source: Style
- Canonical URL: https://style.eu.com/article/hendrik-hey-milc-web3
- Author: Style Newsroom
- Section: Culture
- Published: 2026-08-27T22:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-27T22:00:00.000Z
- Tags: Web3, MILC, Hendrik Hey, Digital Infrastructure

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Hendrik Hey spent three decades building television networks before pivoting to blockchain. The Hamburg-born entrepreneur founded Welt der Wunder in 1996, a science and technology program that grew into one of Europe's best-known media brands, and later acquired national TV stations in Germany and Switzerland before moving into Web3 infrastructure.

His current project, MILC (Media Industry Licensing Content), is built as a persistent three-dimensional marketplace where intellectual property, digital goods and services get created, licensed, financed and traded, with a native tokenization layer and smart contracts handling revenue splits and royalties automatically. The platform already runs real transactions, layers in AI-powered music tools, and is built to comply with Europe's GDPR and MiCAR frameworks rather than route around them.

Hey frames the timing as an opening rather than a risk: as Silicon Valley has largely moved on from Web3 toward AI, he argues Europe is positioned to build the scalable blockchain infrastructure that American projects lack the regulatory clarity to attempt. “The Metaverse and Web3 represent a tremendous opportunity for Europe,” he says. “We have consciously chosen to rely on European technologies and infrastructures.” MILC has also partnered with Queen Mary University of London on AI music systems built around more than 70 patents.

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Originally published by Style. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://style.eu.com/article/hendrik-hey-milc-web3.