Mintlayer (ML) atempts to be a future-proof blockchain that improves direct token interoperability of Bitcoin and enables ways to trade value, create systems, functionalities, and participate in truly trustless finance. MLT is the governance utility token that is used for running blocksigner nodes on the network via staking MLT, and fees for processing transactions, and smart contracts. The MLT ecosystem includes a Bitcoin wallet with the extended functionality of Mintlayer, DEX solutions including Atomic Swaps, Lightning swaps and a Distributed Hash Table to synchronize the trading order book and a Bitcoin Script environment to create smart contracts with additional OP CODES for Access Control List rules to allow better compliance (whitelisting, blacklisting, conditional amount etc.)