Tether Goes All In On AI And Bitcoin To Build A Decentralized Future
Tether (USDT) introduces QVAC, enabling peer-to-peer intelligence (Photo Illustration by ... More Costfoto/NurPhoto)
The pace of technological change has never felt more relentless. Yet for much of the world, innovation remains a distant promise. Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, says the convergence of Bitcoin and AI may finally change that by putting power back in the hands of people, not platforms.
Tether, the company behind USDT, the world's largest company in the digital asset industry, is now venturing into open-source artificial intelligence and decentralized infrastructure.
QuantumVerse Automatic Computer promises to bring AI directly to anyone. It is usable on cheap hardware, without the cloud, and with privacy as a core feature.
QVAC, announced on May 14, is a privacy-preserving, decentralized AI platform that runs entirely on local devices, including low-end smartphones. The idea is both radical and refreshingly simple: intelligence that belongs to the user, not to a corporation or a data center.
Unlike OpenAI or Anthropic, which rely on massive cloud compute infrastructure, QVAC operates without centralized servers. It's built to run on commodity GPUs, making it usable in remote or resource-constrained environments.
Ardoino said QVAC is built with three main goals in mind. It aims to protect user privacy, work in any environment, including offline settings, and give people more innovative tools they can fully control instead of relying on centralized companies.
Tether plans to launch QVAC later this year, with a special emphasis on universities and small businesses.
Where QVAC becomes truly novel is in its agent framework. Each QVAC AI instance will have a non-custodial crypto wallet, allowing it to receive funds, act on instructions, and negotiate transactions autonomously.
This could open the door to a new class of autonomous economic actors, capable of operating peer-to-peer across borders, currencies, and regulatory frameworks. Unlike today's AI assistants, which are primarily passive, QVAC agents are designed to make decisions and even interact with other agents to resolve tasks.
The launch of QVAC inevitably invites comparisons to Bittensor, another decentralized AI protocol that is gaining traction. But Ardoino insists the two projects have fundamentally different goals.
Ardoino explained that while Bittensor focuses on incentivizing model training and inference, QVAC centers on the agents themselves by equipping them with wallets, defined purposes, and the ability to communicate peer to peer. The approach, he noted, is more bottom up and built for resilience.
While Bittensor incentivizes developers to train useful models, QVAC takes a different approach by enabling localized intelligence networks designed to function independently. Bittensor has gained traction among researchers and crypto-native developers, whereas QVAC is targeting broader adoption among real-world users, particularly in emerging markets.
QVAC isn't an isolated initiative. It's a core pillar of Twenty One, a new Bitcoin-native financial company founded by Tether, Strike CEO Jack Mallers, and SoftBank. Launching with 42,000 bitcoin, Twenty One aims to build an entirely new financial ecosystem, one built from the first principles of transparency, decentralization, and censorship resistance.
Ardoino described Bitcoin as peer-to-peer cash and QVAC as peer-to-peer intelligence, emphasizing that together, they lay the groundwork for a parallel system designed to serve the broader global population.
For years, Tether has kept a relatively low public profile despite operating the largest stablecoin in the world. That posture is changing as the company approaches the global AI stage.
Ardoino acknowledged the importance of building trust, noting that QVAC is designed to be user-controlled rather than centralized. He also shared that Tether is collaborating with one of the 'Big Four' accounting firms to provide full transparency.
Tether's role is to provide resilience and quality engineering, the system's base layer that others will expand upon. The company has no plans to charge licensing fees or gate access. If it succeeds, QVAC could become the leader in AI by being open, portable, and impossible to kill.
Critics of Bitcoin treasury strategies, including venture capital investor Nic Carter, have warned that companies hoarding BTC will inevitably sell under stress. Ardoino acknowledged the risk but emphasized that Twenty One is approaching things differently.
Ardoino emphasized the team's strength, calling Mallers an ideal leader for a Bitcoin-focused company and highlighting Tether's and SoftBank's complementary roles in the venture.
Tether is no longer just shaping the future of money. It's building the infrastructure for decentralized intelligence and sovereign technology powered by Bitcoin and AI.
With QVAC, Twenty One, and a bold vision rooted in open access, the company is setting the stage for a more resilient, user-controlled digital world. As the global race for AI dominance accelerates, Tether is positioning itself not just as a competitor but as a catalyst for a more equitable future.
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