Milton "Todd" Ault III - De-Banked and Disconnected - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

We didn't expect it. One decision shut us out of the financial system. Not just one company. Others we owned were cut off too simply because we were connected to Bitcoin mining. 1.

7 billion people worldwide have no access to banking at all. Entire industries from crypto exchanges to miners have been debanked overnight. In the UK, half of crypto and fintech firms say they've been rejected for even a basic bank account. Even regulated companies have had accounts frozen or shut down with no explanation. If it can happen to companies like ours, it can happen to anyone.

So, what's the answer? Decentralized finance restores access when banks deny it. It rebuilds trust, removes gatekeepers, and creates a financial system open to all. Our journey revealed the problem. Web 3 provides the solution.

This is why decentralized finance matters. So, we've been debunked many times. Um, I'm the chairman of a company on the New York Stock Exchange called Hypers Scale Data, symbol GPUs. And I'm also the vice chairman of a company called Universal DeFi on the New York Stock Exchange. And I've learned that TRDFI doesn't mean I'm a or some other weird name.

That actually means that I'm a centralized finance guy who's accepted the idea that DeFi is all that really matters. I'm going to outline for you why this matters to me. And that is our business has been shut down by banks more than 10 times. And imagine having a roughly 150 million in Bitcoin. You sell it at Coinbase a little bit, but you have nowhere to send it.

You can't pay your employees. You can't pay for your insurance. you can't pay for anything. And almost every major institution that we did business with in the United States shut us down at one time. I'd like to call out one bank in particular, US Bank, which I would never do business with again if I were you, who literally took 54 bank accounts away from my institution.

We um are in three countries and effectively have 18 subsidiaries at the time. And it got so bad that my wife, who I have four kids, was effectively a Girl Scout troop leader, she lost her Girl Scout cookie account. Literally, the bank just basically said, "Because you're associated with that bad Bitcoin miner, Todd Alt, we're not going to let you have a bank account." And quite honestly, I really thought I was gonna go out of business if it wasn't for Donald Trump. Now, I'm not going to debate politics with you, but we made a big bet on the administration.

Eight years ago, we wanted to launch this project called Alt Blockchain. We couldn't do it. The lawyer said it just the structure wasn't there. It's there today, and it's because of the Trump administration. It's because the SEC's changes in rules and philosophy.

And being shut out of the banking system is a disaster. And and this is still happening today. Now, I know it's getting easier. There's no question it's getting easier. But I want to talk to you about why we're building the alt blockchain.

And that is basically we want to allow people and you're going to hear a lot about this real world asset thing. You hear it everywhere, right? Real world assets. It's a talking point, but it means nothing without liquidity. And universal DeFi, the company in the New York Stock Exchange, symbol UU, is going to be providing liquidity for real world assets in which you think about if you put any asset on the blockchain, you tokenize it.

If there's not an underlying bid for that asset, and we all know, those of you who are trading real world assets now know there's no liquidity. Don't kid yourself. It's going to be a long time before that happens because there's really no centralized way to trade it. And I would argue you don't want a centralized way to trade it, right? But what you do need is to understand that DeFi, in my opinion, is going to rule the world.

I'll explain to you simply why that's the case. And I, by the way, 35 years on Wall Street, I started off my career, Dean Witter, did tons of underwritings, tons of IPOs, and I have completely drank the Kool-Aid that there is not going to be I okay, I I love the New York Stock Exchange. I love the NASDAQ, but if you don't change really quickly, all these DGens are coming for you. They're all coming for your jobs. There ain't going to be any more centralized.

There's not a centralized place in my opinion. Now, it has to exist. I get I understand that. But the idea of what's happened in decentralized finance, there's no way to stop it now. It's it's a worm.

It's a virus. You can't stop. There's no cure. You're not going to be able to take Lysol or Clorox or whatever they said we should take to clean it up. It's not going away.

It's a virus that's great. You got to drink it all in and allow yourself to understand. I've been mining Bitcoin since 2011, aggressively mining Bitcoin starting in 2017. And there was a period of time where it was like a scarlet letter in the United States. But what's happened over time is the biggest institutions in the world have figured out we better catch up.

Now I'll lay out a thesis for you about this in a second. If you have ever studied history and I encourage you all that use chat GPT or ask ROI, it's another AI app like chat GPT. I encourage you to look this up. What have been the financial capitals of the world? So we all know if we took study it was Babylon, right?

And it was eventually Rome. I'm I'm going to skip around a little bit. It was Rome and Baghdad and Venice and in the 1800s it was London and then eventually the New York in the 1900s and now uh in the 2000s it was Singapore, New York, London and eventually uh Dubai and where you have it now that the the the the capitals of the world for finance are those areas. But I would argue going forward there is no place that's the capital of the world. It doesn't exist anymore.

It's going to be DGens. It's going to be DeFi. And think about that. There's always been these centers of the worlds that are ahead of capital. There's as long as man has existed, whether it was in Egypt at one time or Rome, there's been controlled finance.

The idea that human beings are not going to have to go to one location to get this controlled finance is really what's changing everything. So our story in terms of policy is to basically position ourselves with the right people and tell them how we think this is coming. Now do I think that I had any influence on the Trump administration? No, I don't think I had any. But I helped a little bit by saying the policies of Obama and the Biden administration, the choke point scenario where they wanted to choke you out of finance where if you were a gun manufacturer, you couldn't get a bank account.

Uh if you if you it was legal to sell marijuana in one place but illegal to take a credit card to do it. It this these policies are insane. But it drove us to understand that this insanity made it possible for decentralized finance. And I think if you all think that we're busy, right? Like we're really busy and we're we're maybe we missed it.

Did you miss it? Did you think I missed decentralized finance? It's too late for Bitcoin. It's too late for crypto. We're not even in the first inning.

We're in like double a ball. And I'll outline that for you. There's $579 trillion worth of assets globally. That's a guess. Can run that through chat GPT.

About 250 billion of them or so to 379 billion or trillion are in real estate. Another 250 million in other 250 trillion I can't even say the word or in other assets. But a fraction of them, I mean a little tiny little piece of the entire crypto market, which is approximately $4 trillion, 2.4 trillion of its Bitcoin. You take that out and there is no tokenization.

Nothing. You guys, this is a huge conference. One of the most amazing things I've seen being here and the people I'm meeting here. And the amount of innovation taking place here is amazing. But it's just getting started.

Like people don't realize where you're at. This is this is you. You who have a wallet are centralized finance. You are the head of the world. You basically are the head of all finance.

You control your own destiny. And what I supply to you is that we're creating a blockchain so that people can build real world assets on them that have liquidity. And so we own a broker dealer, part of a broker dealer, a transfer agent, a corresponding clearing firm for other broker dealers. That's traditional finance. But the world is going to run that fast, but it's too late.

Sorry, Jamie Diamond. It's too late for you. This is all going to pass you by. It I really believe this sincerely that traditional finance is going to go completely DeFi in some hybrid centralization. the idea of convincing people.

Now I see people say, "Why are you putting these up there?" Because these are the policy makers that have bought into it. She converted from being a Democrat to a Republican. Anything is possible now. Pam Bondi, thank God I know her because I, you know, the prior attorney general probably wanted to lock me up.

And then Rick Grenell, who's a policy maker who brought Tether back to the United States. These are people making a difference. You got to get to know their policies and understand them because you are basically you have become centralized finance. Um I don't know about Tucker. I mean Tucker Tucker is pretty big into in Dubai now, right?

Um but the concept here is that all this came together. I I put up all these names up here to point out that these different people, they all were not friends at one point, but they all love each other now, right? And the point is is that uh the attorney general of of of Utah, he's he's going to head up our our our DAO. They are all on the same side as you now, understanding that they can't miss out, that they got to be part of what's happening here. And so for us, the idea is how do you bring real world assets on chain?

And what we're doing is we're taking everything we own in private equity. We're taking the crane company. We're taking the defense business, the licensed lender, the casino, everything we have in private equity and we're saying we're committing to putting these on chain and you're going to see this in a rapid rate really around the world. So when you hear this real world asset thing, you have to ask yourself, how is it going to have any liquidity? And that's kind of where we're going to specialize in adding liquidity, allowing people to trade them around the world, and doing it in a way where you don't get debanked.

Now, I'm circling back to this process because most of you out there, developers, creators, investors, the next leg of this is figuring out how you're going to create rails that let decentralized finance allow your wallet to never leave the ecosphere. So imagine that I can pay my employees in Tether. I can pay all my bills in Tether. I can acquire stuff in Tether. I can borrow in Tether.

I never ever have to touch this touch the centralized market. My employees can all have wallets. Now I have I can't figure that out. You guys need to figure that out. Someone in this audience needs to tell me how this is all going to happen.

But I know what's going to happen. I know what's going to happen. I'm completely convinced that what we're building in terms of layer 1 infrastructure will be compliant. We're not, by the way, against following the rules. We want to follow all the rules, but they got to make the rules clear.

And in the meantime, this is why it's spreading around the world. This is why wallets are going to be such a big deal because you you got to realize that the the centralized game, the people who are in centralized finance now are freaking out. They don't know what to do. I mean, the king of the king of crypto is Donald Trump. He's 78 years old.

So, you got to realize they don't know what to do about this. And they're trying to figure it out. And the genie's out of the bottle. There's no way to put it back in the bottle. So, we're doing this by selling nodes.

We have a 500,000 nodes for sale. We're selling a backbone of proof of work around the globe where these nodes can earn 10 years worth of emissions. They can earn the coin. No one's giving the coin away to you. You're not going up against foundercoin.

You're not going up against trading against other people that got the coin for free. Everybody earns their keep in centralized fin in decentralized finance with us. There's a shift to tokenization. I've talked about that. And it's important to understand that the underlying yield effect and the trading I mean if you're paying attention to what's happening with hyperlquid uh and what's happening with Binance CZ you're you're seeing clearly right now that Hyperlid has got about 20% of the market.

That's an example of sort of an exponential move in the marketplace whereas in less than a year trillions of dollars of assets are trading there and they're doing it with 11 people. So this brings back us to why we're doing AI. So we own an AI data center in Michigan because not only are these companies launching products with less people, but they're on a profitability basis, they're more profitable than ever before with less employees. So AI, I submit to you, and decentralized finance are colliding in a way that's going to make it so that the financial capital of the world is you. It's cyberspace backed by Bitcoin traded on all markets.

And the the conclusion there is we're building something that we want to be able to provide access 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. And this is a big goal. I know that it sounds a little absurd, but the goal is to be able to provide access to trading all assets globally 24 hours a day connected around the world. Alt Markets is uh effectively like a Bloomberg on steroids powered by AI. I'm super proud of this.

It's something that um I worked on for about 20 years and now AI has made it all possible. The advancement in technology in the last couple months has made it possible. I've got to go. I appreciate your time. If you want to be interested in Node, let us know.

Dale's over there. I appreciate everybody. Thank you so much. Enjoy the conference. This is a great conference, everybody.