The Bank of Italy's innovation hub has selected a decentralized finance (DeFi) project involving Polygon Labs and Fireblocks to help financial institutions experiment with DeFi and tokenized assets. The Milano Hub will support the development of the Institutional DeFi for Security Token ecosystem for six months, which aims to assist traditional financial institutions in experimenting with security tokens and executing transactions using DeFi rails in a safe, regulated manner. The project will involve Italian banks, asset managers, and financial institutions, including Intesa Sanpaolo, the country's largest banking group. The initiative aims to create a safe and open operating environment for supervised entities to use DeFi.