Milton “Todd” Ault III is the founder of Ault Blockchain and executive chairman of Hyperscale Data (NYSE American: GPUS). Hyperscale Data is an AI data center company whose subsidiaries are building two things: Ault Blockchain, a finance-first, EVM-compatible layer one, and Ault Markets, the trading venue that sits on top of it. Ault has spent 37 years in traditional finance, starting at Dean Witter and running a hedge fund for much of that time. He has been involved with Bitcoin since 2011, later spent hundreds of millions of dollars building a mining operation, and says he was debanked around ten times before the US regulatory climate changed.
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Most new layer ones are built to trade perpetual futures. Ault thinks the bigger gap is in spot commodities. Trillions of dollars of metals trade every year, yet only about $5 billion has been tokenized, and buying physical silver still usually means a trip to a local dealer. Ault Markets opened to invited users in early October, and the group has since tokenized its first 5,000 troy ounces of silver, vaulted at The Wyoming Reserve. Ault describes the end goal: trade silver, gold, platinum, and palladium around the clock without KYC, complete KYC only when you want physical delivery, and have the metal shipped within one to three days. Behind the metals he plans tokenized convertible loans and structured notes, and he wants roughly 400 real-world assets on chain within two years. New offices in Dubai and Singapore are part of that push.
The company sold Bitcoin to help fund its Michigan campus, which has switched off its miners and moved to AI hosting under a contract the company values at up to $1.2 billion. Ault does not expect miners to switch back. He compares AI to the early internet, with one difference: the internet had an adoption problem, while AI has a capacity problem. He still calls himself something of a Bitcoin maximalist. He describes Bitcoin as the pristine collateral at the base of future finance and gives credit to Michael Saylor for reading the history of money correctly.
The hot take round adds more. Ault calls himself multi-chain and predicts that reserve banking as we know it is finished. He expects more than $10 trillion in tokenized assets within a decade, and he wants the US to hold Bitcoin as a strategic reserve and issue Bitcoin-backed debt. For a sign that the future is already here, he points to onchain perps: when he asks rooms of Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley advisors whether they have used Hyperliquid, almost nobody raises a hand. On sci-fi, he names Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars before settling on The Matrix. Then, live on air, he asks his AI assistant Jenna to look up Andy, and she does.
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