Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino revealed the company’s AI assistant, QVAC. This effort is Tether’s entry into the decentralized AI space, focusing on privacy and hardware accessibility rather than centralized cloud computing.
Paolo Ardino share Here’s a short demo of his X. He indicates that the tool runs entirely on the local device. The assistant created and assigned tasks in Asana using simple natural language commands.
Test Tether’s QVAC AI assistant
Many skills are already supported via MCP, and the example below uses Asana (on a below-average laptop GPU)
100% local inference/reasoning
Open source coming soon pic.twitter.com/sYi91QhjVC— Paolo Ardoino 🤖 (@paoloardoino) February 12, 2026
The system uses “100% local inference and inference.” The demo was run on a laptop with a below-average GPU. This detail caught our attention because most AI tools rely on powerful cloud servers. The assistant runs directly on the user’s device.
No data is sent to cloud servers. This approach fits into the encryption philosophy of user control and privacy. Many cloud AI tools collect and store user data. QVAC aims to avoid this problem by keeping everything local. This is even more important in finance and cryptocurrencies, where users value control. The move also brings Tether into the growing AI race.
Tether plans to introduce first AI application based on QVAC
The internal thinking process of the system was reflected through the model thinking toggle button before the tool invocation process. Metrics displayed on the terminal about the efficiency of the model included the time it took to generate the first token, 1062.1 ms, and the rate of 34.6 tokens per second.
The assistant uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This system allows you to connect to various tools and services. New “skills” can be added without changing the core model.
The company plans to introduce its first AI application based on QVAC. Tether said it wants to build a decentralized AI ecosystem and usher in an era of unlimited intelligence. CEO Paolo Ardoino said AI will make important decisions in people’s lives, but the infrastructure is currently fragile, invasive and opaque.
Previously, blockchain compatible platform We emphasized that QVAC’s modular architecture allows developers to build and extend applications using small, configurable components. Tether added that peer-to-peer networking facilitates communication and collaboration between devices directly without relying on a centralized server.
This is made possible through a consumer app for local, on-device AI processing called QVAC Workbench. So far, Tether has made further investments in communications, energy production, and artificial intelligence infrastructure. Tether first launched QVAC AI in May and further expanded the QVAC Genesis II AI dataset to 148 billion tokens in December.
As reported by Cryptopolitan, the company says its architecture allows the QVAC ecosystem to scale to trillions of AI agents and applications without any points of failure while delivering a first-of-its-kind Infinite Intelligence swarm.
The upcoming open source release will be the ultimate test of whether the tool can garner interest from the broader developer community and provide a viable path to decentralized digital assistants.
Tether expands assets backing USDT
Tether’s USDT continues to dominate with a market cap of $184 billion, according to DefiLlama data. USAT, the US-based organization of the stablecoin company founded last month, had just $20 million in circulating supply.
The company has expanded the assets backing its market-leading flagship stablecoin, USDT. According to S&P Global, between September 2024 and November 2025, the proportion of USDT backed by “high-risk” assets such as gold and Bitcoin rose from 17% to 24%, while the proportion of US Treasury bills fell from 81% to 75%.
Tether could soon become one of the top 10 buyers of U.S. Treasury bills, said Beau Hines, CEO of Tether’s U.S. division. USDT currently has approximately $185 billion in circulation, serves an estimated 530 million users, and is adding approximately 30 million new users every quarter.
To back this supply, Tether holds over $122 billion in US Treasury bills, representing over 83% of its reserves. At current levels, Tether ranks among the world’s top 20 holders of US government debt, among major sovereign states such as Germany and Saudi Arabia.
Tether has become one of the world’s largest holders of gold, competing with national and multinational banks. Last year, he also became the third largest shareholder in Adecoagro, Argentina’s largest milk and rice producer.
