The richest man in USDT, a stablecoin, stuffed a mattress into his shopping cart.

Author: David , Deep Tide TechFlow

On March 4, stablecoin giant Tether announced an investment.

The invested company is called Eight Sleep, which makes smart mattresses. Tether invested $50 million, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.

This company's mattresses are very high-end, priced between $2,000 and $4,000 each. They feature built-in water-cooling and water-heating systems for precise temperature control, sleep data tracking, and automatic adjustment...

LeBron James, the famous NBA star, is one of its public users. Its main clientele consists of Silicon Valley executives, professional athletes, and a group of biohackers who are keen to use themselves as guinea pigs.

The issuer of USDT, the world's largest stablecoin, has net profits exceeding $10 billion in 2025. It is almost entirely opaque, not publicly listed, and does not need to explain its operations to any shareholders.

Then, it invested 50 million in a mattress company?

Of course, this isn't the first strange sum of money. Looking through Tether's investment history over the past few years, it turns out that mattresses might not be the most perplexing thing.

It all started with the company's CEO.

The CEO's shopping cart is filled with human sovereignty.

Paolo Ardoino, born in 1984, is from Genoa and started writing code at the age of 8.

He studied computer science in college and stayed on to do research at the university after graduation, specializing in cryptography. His projects were used by the military. He read the Bitcoin white paper in 2012, joined Bitfinex in 2014, became Tether CTO in 2017, and was promoted to CEO in 2023.

A Fortune magazine reporter visited his office and noticed dumbbells and a gym bag on his desk.

This person brings his gym gear to work every day. He's the kind of person who manages his body like a system, tracking, optimizing, and controlling every aspect, including sleep, training, and vital signs.

He then extended this logic to everything: money, communication, data, the body; he believed that people should have complete sovereignty over everything they own.

And he believes:

The US government will collapse sooner or later.

This is no joke. Paolo has said publicly that he did all this not to make money, but to leave people a way out after the system fails.

His exact words were:

“I don’t think the best solution is to fix the politics of each country. The best solution is to allow people to freely form communities through technology, where a sense of belonging comes from shared values, not geographical location.”

It sounds like a line from a science fiction novel. But Paolo is serious. His keynote address at BTC Prague 2024 was simply titled:

"Built for the end of the world".

Understanding this makes Tethter's investment in the mattress company understandable. Every item in the company's shopping cart represents an extension of the CEO's worldview: the sovereignty of body data.

In 2022, he co-created a platform called Holepunch. This platform does something simple: it allows people to make calls, send messages, and transfer files, without any servers involved. It's a direct P2P connection, where the signal goes directly from your device to the recipient's device.

You can understand it as sovereignty over communications.

Then there's QVAC. Tether's health platform, launched at the end of 2025, encrypts all your vital signs data—heart rate, sleep, exercise records—and stores it on your own device, without uploading it to any cloud.

Paolo explained the product by saying, "AI has become politicized and centralized today, and we want to create AI that can run locally on your device, keeping everything about yourself in your hands."

This is about data sovereignty.

Therefore, after acquiring Eight Sleep and connecting its mattress to QVAC, it became a node in the body data sovereignty infrastructure. Your sleep data does not belong to Apple, Google, or any cloud platform.

It's yours to keep.

Furthermore, Paolo's $200 million acquisition of a majority stake in brain-computer interface company Blackrock Neurotech may not be because he is optimistic about the size of the brain-computer interface market, but because he does not want the brain-computer interface to be controlled by others.

As I write this, I'm reminded of another quote he made in an interview: "We've made more money than we could spend in hundreds of years. My biggest fear is wasting this once-in-a-century opportunity."

This statement is difficult to evaluate. A person can simultaneously believe that civilization will collapse, and also believe that they have a responsibility to use money to prevent it, or at least, to leave behind an infrastructure that can be restarted after the collapse.

Of course, this assumes you are Tether, with $10 billion in annual profit, making investment an extension of your worldview.

You have to trust Tether before you can distrust anyone else.

Paolo's philosophy of sovereignty has a premise that he never mentions.

USDT is the world's most widely circulated stablecoin, with a market capitalization of $183 billion, backed by an equivalent amount of US dollar reserves, at least according to Tether.

Where these reserves are located, who holds them, and whether each transaction actually exists—Tether has never undergone a complete independent audit.

This company is not publicly listed and is not required to disclose information to shareholders, operating in a regulatory vacuum for over a decade. How these funds were calculated, and what its balance sheet looks like, are only known to outsiders through Tether's own reports.

Those who hold USDT must choose to believe that this is real. There is no other option.

This is where the subtlety lies. The CEO has been investing in various companies that build human data sovereignty, seemingly straying from his core business to build an infrastructure for "controlling human data sovereignty";

But this infrastructure itself was built with money from a company that demands your unconditional trust.

Paolo said it was "built for the end of the world," but if the end of the world really comes, if the dollar system really collapses, what will become of the $183 billion that Tether holds in US Treasury bonds?

He has never publicly answered this question.

With more money, investing becomes a form of autobiography.

When you have enough money, your investment portfolio becomes an autobiography of your worldview.

Elon Musk bought Twitter because he believes free speech is being stifled by tech platforms; he bought SpaceX because he believes Earth's civilization needs a backup. Peter Thiel invested in PayPal because he believes government monopoly on currency is wrong; he invested in Palantir because he believes the national security system needs to be rebuilt by Silicon Valley.

Bryan Johnson spends millions of dollars each year experimenting on himself, with the goal of reversing his biological age to 18.

These people's investments seem diverse, but the underlying logic is consistent:

They are using money to build the world they believe should exist. Returns are secondary, sometimes not even a consideration.

From this perspective, Tether's CEO Paolo isn't exactly an outlier. However, there's one thing that sets him apart from the others mentioned above.

The actual circulation scenario of USDT is far more complex than Paolo's presentation.

Argentinians use it to hedge against peso devaluation, Nigerians use it for cross-border remittances, and Turks use it to preserve their savings when the lira plummets. These are real and valuable examples, and Paolo was referring to these people when he talked about financial inclusion.

However, USDT is also a tool for circumventing sanctions, a transit point for cross-border money laundering, a settlement currency for dark web transactions, and a receiving address for ransomware... This is also true.

Tether addresses have appeared on the US Treasury Department's sanctions list, and a UN report has mentioned the scale of USDT usage in Southeast Asian scam zones. Tether cooperated in freezing some assets, but much more had already been transferred before the freeze.

The reason this system can achieve a market capitalization of 183 billion and annual profits of 10 billion is partly because it is sufficiently "neutral." It doesn't ask where the money comes from or where it goes.

These profits then flowed to brain-computer interfaces, peer-to-peer communication, data sovereignty, and bodily sovereignty, into an idealistic infrastructure "built for the apocalypse."

From infrastructure built through gray-market channels to infrastructure projects chasing utopian ideals. The same system, the same CEO, the same money.

With more money, investing can indeed be a form of autobiography.

Paolo didn't finish writing this autobiography. He skipped over a few pages, making them difficult to examine in detail.