The Shopping Cart of the Stablecoin USDT Tycoon Now Includes a Mattress

Original Author: David, TechFlow

On March 4th, stablecoin giant Tether announced an investment.

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

The company's mattresses are very high-end, with individual prices ranging from $2,000 to $4,000. They feature built-in water cooling and heating systems for precise temperature control, sleep data tracking, and automatic adjustment...

Famous NBA star LeBron James is one of its public users. Its main customer base consists of Silicon Valley executives, professional athletes, and a group of biohackers who are passionate about experimenting on themselves.

The issuer of the world's largest stablecoin, USDT, reported a net profit exceeding $10 billion in 2025. It is almost completely opaque to the outside, is not publicly listed, and does not need to explain its actions to any shareholders.

And then, it spends $50 million investing in a mattress company?

Of course, this isn't the first strange investment. Looking through Tether's investment record over the past few years, the mattress might not even be the most puzzling thing.

Everything starts with the company's CEO.

The CEO's Shopping Cart is Full of Human Sovereignty

Paolo Ardoino, born in 1984 in Genoa, started coding at the age of 8.

He studied computer science in university and stayed on as a researcher after graduation, focusing on cryptography for military projects. He read the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2012, joined Bitfinex in 2014, became Tether's CTO in 2017, and was promoted to CEO in 2023.

A Fortune magazine reporter once interviewed him in his office and noticed dumbbells and a gym bag by his desk.

This person brings his workout gear to the office every day. He is the type who manages his body like a system, tracking, optimizing, and controlling every aspect—sleep, training, biometric data—in his own hands.

Then, he extended this logic to everything: money, communication, data, the body. He believes people should have complete sovereignty over everything that belongs to them.

And, he believes:

The US government will eventually collapse.

This is not a joke. Paolo has said publicly that he is doing all this not to make money, but to leave people a way out when the system fails.

His exact words were:

"I don't think the best solution is to fix the politics of every country. The best solution is to let people freely form communities through technology, where belonging comes from shared values, not geographic location."

It sounds like a line from a sci-fi novel. But Paolo is serious. His keynote speech at BTC Prague 2024 was directly titled:

"Built for the Apocalypse."

Understanding this makes Tether's investment in a mattress company make sense. Because every item in the company's shopping cart corresponds to an extension of the CEO's worldview: sovereignty over body data.

In 2022, he co-founded a platform called Holepunch. What it does is simple: allows people to make calls, send messages, and transfer files without passing through any servers. It's P2P direct connection, with signals going directly from your device to the recipient's device.

You can think of it as sovereignty over communication.

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

When explaining this product, Paolo said: "AI today has already been politicized and centralized. We want to create AI that can run locally on your device, keeping everything about you in your own hands."

This is about data sovereignty.

Thus, after acquiring Eight Sleep, this mattress, once integrated with QVAC, becomes a node in the infrastructure for body data sovereignty. Your sleep data doesn't belong to Apple, Google, or any cloud platform.

It belongs to you.

Furthermore, Paolo's $200 million acquisition of a majority stake in the brain-computer interface company Blackrock Neurotech might not be because he is bullish on the market size of brain-computer interfaces, but because he doesn't want the field of brain-computer interfacing to be controlled by others.

Writing this, I recall another thing he said in an interview: "We've made money that we couldn't spend in hundreds of years. My biggest fear is wasting this once-in-a-century opportunity."

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

Of course, the prerequisite is that you are Tether, with $10 billion in annual profit, allowing investments to become an extension of your worldview.

You Must First Trust Tether, to Trust No One Else

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

USDT is the world's most circulated stablecoin. Behind its $183 billion market cap is supposedly an equivalent amount of US dollar reserves, at least that's what Tether says.

Where these reserves are held, who custodies them, whether each transaction is real—Tether has never undergone a full, independent audit.

The company is not publicly listed, doesn't need to disclose to shareholders, and has operated in a regulatory vacuum for over a decade. How this money is calculated, what the balance sheet looks like—outsiders only see reports released by Tether itself.

People holding USDT must choose to believe all of this is real. There is no other option.

This is the subtle part. The CEO keeps investing in various companies building human data sovereignty, seemingly going off on a tangent to build a set of infrastructure for "controlling human data sovereignty";

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

Paolo talks about "building for the apocalypse," but if the apocalypse really comes, if the US dollar system really collapses, with USDT reserves held in US Treasury bonds, what would happen to the corresponding $183 billion belonging to Tether.

He hasn't publicly answered this question.

With Enough Money, Investment Becomes an 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; SpaceX exists because he believes Earth's civilization needs a backup. Peter Thiel invested in PayPal because he believes the government's monopoly on money 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 a year experimenting on himself, aiming to reverse his biological age to 18.

The things these people invest in may seem diverse, but the internal logic is consistent:

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

Looking at it this way, Tether's CEO Paolo is not an outlier. However, one thing makes him somewhat different from the people mentioned above.

The real circulation scenarios for USDT are far more complex than Paolo's speech scripts.

Argentinians use it to hedge against peso devaluation, Nigerians use it for cross-border remittances, Turks use it to preserve savings when the lira plummets. These are real, valuable uses—these are the people Paolo talks about when he mentions financial inclusion.

But USDT is also a tool for sanctions evasion, a transit point for cross-border money laundering, a settlement currency for dark web transactions, a payment address for ransomware... This is also real.

Tether addresses have appeared on the US Treasury's sanctions list, UN reports have mentioned the scale of USDT use in Southeast Asian scam compounds. Tether has cooperated in freezing some assets, but more had already been transferred before freezing.

Part of the reason this system has achieved a $183 billion market cap and $10 billion annual profit is precisely because it is sufficiently "neutral." It doesn't ask where the money comes from or where it's going.

And then these profits flow into brain-computer interfaces, P2P communication, data sovereignty, body sovereignty, flowing into a set of idealistic infrastructure "built for the apocalypse."

From the infrastructure of grey circulation, to the infrastructure chasing utopia. The same system, the same CEO, the same money.

With enough money, investment indeed becomes an autobiography.

It's just that Paolo hasn't fully finished writing this autobiography. There are a few pages he has turned over, difficult to delve into deeply.