STABILIZED CURRENCY USDT'S RICHEST SHOPPING CAR, STUFFED INTO A MATTRESS

Original by David, Deep tide TechFlow

On March 4, the stabilization money giant Tether announced an investment。

It's called Eight Sleep, smart mattress. Tether out 50 million dollars to price this company 1.5 billion。

This company's mattresses are very high-end, single-sale prices range from 2000 to $400,000.

THE FAMOUS NBA STAR JAMES IS ONE OF THE OPEN USERS. ITS MAIN CUSTOMERS ARE SILICON VALLEY EXECUTIVES, PROFESSIONAL ATHLETES AND A GROUP OF BIOLOGICAL HACKERS INTERESTED IN USING THEMSELVES AS AN EXPERIMENT。

THE ISSUER OF THE WORLD ' S LARGEST STABLE CURRENCY, USDT, HAD A NET PROFIT OF MORE THAN $10 BILLION IN 2025, WAS VIRTUALLY NON-TRANSPARENT, WAS NOT LISTED AND DID NOT NEED TO EXPLAIN WHAT HE WAS DOING TO ANY SHAREHOLDER。

And then it cost 50 million to invest in a mattress company

Of course, this is not the first strange money. Turning through Tether's investment records over the years, it turns out that mattresses may not be the most confusing thing。

EVERYTHING STARTS WITH THE CEO OF THIS COMPANY。

THE CEO'S SHOPPING VAN IS FULL OF HUMAN SOVEREIGNTY

Paolo Ardoino, born 1984, Genoa, 8 years old, began writing code。

The university is a computer-reading institution, and after graduation studies are carried out in the direction of ciphery, which is used by the military. In 2012, the Bitcoin White Paper was read, in 2014 it was added to Bitfinex, in 2017 it became Tether CTO, and in 2023 it was promoted to CEO。

The journalist of Fortune magazine had previously visited his office and noticed that the table had a dumb bell and a gym bag。

This man works every day with fitness equipment. He is the type of person who manages the body as a system, sleep, training, physical data, each of which is tracked, optimized and in his own hands。

He then extended that logic to everything: money, communication, data, body, and he believed that people should have full sovereignty over everything they had。

And he believed:

Sooner or later, the United States Government will collapse。

It's not a joke. Paolo has stated publicly that he did all this not to make money, but to leave people a way back after the system failed。

His words were:

"I don't think the best solution is to fix the politics of every country. The best option is to allow people to form their communities freely through technology and to feel belonging to common values rather than geographic location

Sounds like the lines in science fiction. But Paolo is serious. He gave a keynote address at the BTC Prague 2024 Congress under the direct title:

"For the end."。

To understand that, Sethter invested in mattress companies. Because every thing in the company's shopping cart is the extension of the CEO's worldview, the sovereignty of body data。

In 2022, he was involved in creating a platform called Holepunch. It's a simple thing to do: to get people to make phone calls, to send messages, to send documents, but not through any server. P2P Straight Company, signal directly from your device to the equipment of the other party。

You can understand the sovereignty of communications。

And then QVAC. Tether launched a health platform at the end of 2025, where all your vital data -- heart rate, sleep, sports records -- are encrypted on your own devices, without any cloud。

Paolo explained the product by saying, "Ai has been politicized and centralized today, and we want to create an AI that can operate locally on your equipment, so that everything about yourself remains in your hands."

It's about the sovereignty of the data。

So, after the acquisition of Eight Sleep, after the mattress was connected to QVAC, it became a node of the body data sovereignty infrastructure. Your sleep data is not apples, not Google, not cloud platforms。

Yours。

In addition, Paolo spent $200 million on taking most of the shares of Blackrock Neurotech, the brain interface company, and probably not because he looked at the size of the market for the brain interface, but because he did not want the brain machine to be controlled。

In writing here, I think of another thing he said in his interview: "We've been making money for centuries. My greatest fear is to waste this opportunity of a hundred years."

This is difficult to assess. A person can at the same time believe that civilization will collapse and that he or she has a responsibility to use money to stop it, or at least leave behind an infrastructure that can be restarted after the collapse。

And, of course, if you're Tether, with   $10 billion in annual profits, making investment an extension of your worldview。

You have to trust Tether to trust anyone

Paolo's philosophy of sovereignty has a premise he never raised。

USDT is the most stable currency in global circulation, behind the $18.3 billion market value, an equivalent dollar reserve, at least Tether says so。

Where, by whom, and whether or not these reserves are real or not, Tether has never been subjected to a full independent audit。

The company is not listed and does not need to be disclosed to shareholders, and has operated in a regulatory vacuum for more than a decade. How did this money come out, what the balance sheet looks like, all the outsiders see is Tether's own report。

PEOPLE WHO HOLD USDT MUST CHOOSE TO BELIEVE THAT IT'S ALL TRUE. THERE ARE NO OTHER OPTIONS。

THAT'S THE DELICATE PLACE. CEOS HAVE BEEN INVESTING IN COMPANIES THAT BUILD SOVEREIGNTY OVER HUMAN DATA, AND SEEM TO BE IN A VERY BAD BUSINESS TO BUILD AN INFRASTRUCTURE THAT " CONTROLS SOVEREIGNTY OVER HUMAN DATA."

But the infrastructure itself was built with money from a company that asked you to trust it unconditionally。

Paolo talks about "building for the end," but if the end comes, if the dollar system really collapses, what will the USDT reserve be in the US Treasury debt, the $183 billion that Tether will have。

He has not answered this question publicly。

There's more money. It's an autobiography

With enough money, the portfolio becomes an autobiography of the world view。

Elon Musk buys Twitter because he believes that freedom of expression is being stifled by technological platforms; SpaceX because he believes that Earth civilization needs a backup. Peter Thiel voted for PayPal because he believed that the Government ' s monopoly on money was wrong and Palantir because he believed that the national security system needed to be rebuilt by Silicon Valley。

Bryan Johnson spends millions of dollars a year on himself as an experiment and aims to turn his biological age to 18。

These people throw a lot of stuff, but the internal logic is the same:

They are using money to build a world they believe in. Rewards are secondary and sometimes not considered at all。

So, Tether's CEO Paolo is not an alien. There's just one thing that makes him different from these people。

The USDT real circulation scene is much more complicated than Paolo's speech。

Argentines use it against the devaluation of the peso, Nigerians use it for cross-border remittances, and Turks use it to save their savings when Li La falls. These are real, valuable people that Paolo said about financial inclusion。

BUT THE USDT IS ALSO A TOOL FOR SANCTIONS EVASION, A TRANS-BORDER MONEY-LAUNDERING STOP, A CASHIER'S CURRENCY FOR DARK-NET TRANSACTIONS, A COLLECTION ADDRESS FOR EXTORTION SOFTWARE... IT'S ALSO TRUE。

Tether's address appeared on the United States Treasury's sanctions list, and the size of USDT's use in Southeast Asia's fraud park was mentioned in a United Nations report. Tether has cooperated with the freezing of some assets, but more have been moved long before the freezing。

Part of the reason why the system has a market value of 183 billion and a profit of 10 billion years is because it is sufficiently neutral. Not where the money comes from, not where it goes。

THE PROFITS THEN FLOW TO BRAIN INTERFACES, P2P COMMUNICATIONS, DATA SOVEREIGNTY, BODY SOVEREIGNTY, AND AN IDEALISTIC INFRASTRUCTURE "BUILDING FOR THE END."。

FROM GREY-FLOWED INFRASTRUCTURE TO UTOPIAN INFRASTRUCTURE. SAME SYSTEM, SAME CEO, SAME MONEY。

With more money, investment is an autobiography。

It's just this autobiography, Paolo isn't completely finished. It's hard to look into a few pages of him。