Ault Blockchain – Silver First, Then Everything Else

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.

Why you should listen 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.

Ault is unusually candid about what he would do differently. Ault Blockchain distributes its token through capped mining node licenses with a ten-year emissions schedule and no public token sale. He says he would not use that model again: the node sales raised a few million dollars, a small sum next to what he has spent. He also credits them with building a following of around 4,000 node holders. The token economics follow Hyperliquid, with nearly all DEX revenue going to buy back the protocol token. He says vendors have told him he is the first founder they have met who did not care about the token price.

He is just as frank about Bitcoin. His 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