April 9, 2026 – Tether’s QVAC team today announced the launch of QVAC SDK, a fully open-source cross-platform Software Development Kit, designed to become a universal building block for artificial intelligence, in a world where 10 billion people will soon share this planet with 10 billion autonomous machines and a trillion AI agents. We call it the “Stable Intelligence Era”.
At Tether we are building the foundation layer for the next computing age. We see AI as a new element of the periodic table – a resource that can be embedded in the structure of the universe. QVAC is the atomic unit of this new world. It is a modular, highly efficient, local-first AI platform designed to run anywhere, on any device, platform, and operating system. From the most powerful industrial server to the smallest chip in a light bulb. We design AI as a highly advanced, interlocking intelligence system: standardized, stackable and infinitely scalable. With the current limitations of edge AI, both in terms of models and hardware, rapidly fading over time, QVAC is the first intelligence framework that can evolve with silicon, adapting to the future, for the next tens, hundreds, millions and billions of years.
QVAC SDK is a unified software development kit that allows developers to build, run, and refine AI directly on any device and consistently across all environments. The vision is simple but radical: intelligence should not be a service for hire. It should be owned by the people who use it. This new groundbreaking framework enables intelligence tools like LLMs, as well as other most commonly used AI constructs, to run at scale directly on consumer devices, smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, and even industrial servers. Applications built with the SDK can run unchanged on iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux. The same codebase runs in all supported environments, without platform-specific branching, rewrites, or conditional logic. A new paradigm that enables 100% private and personal intelligence.
For consumers, this means that the AI features they use every day, from writing and translation assistance to voice transcription, image generation, personal accounting, daily financial planning, summaries, smart search and more, can work directly on their devices without sending sensitive data back and forth to remote servers. QVAC-powered applications continue to work even in low-connectivity environments, making AI more practical in real-world situations. If the internet goes down, the AI continues to work. If a server farm goes offline, nothing changes for the user.
For developers, the SDK simplifies building and deploying local AI across platforms, allowing teams to start once and deliver a consistent experience everywhere. Instead of managing separate deployments for different operating systems or relying entirely on cloud APIs, developers can focus on building products that feel faster, more personalized, and more resilient.
The core of the SDK is a unified abstraction layer across multiple local inference engines. QVAC SDK is built on QVAC Fabric, a fork of llama.cpp, and provides broad compatibility with the llama.cpp model ecosystem for text generation, embeddings, and multimodal workloads. The SDK also integrates additional best-in-class local search engines, including whisper.cpp and Parakeet for speech-to-text and Bergamot (NMT) for on-device translation. These engines are made accessible through a consistent API, allowing developers to combine or switch capabilities without changing the application logic.
“The world is approaching a moment when billions of people share the planet with billions of autonomous machines and trillions of AI agents,” said Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether. “The current model, which sends every decision through a centralized server, will not scale to meet that reality. The laws of physics alone make centralized AI a dead end: light latency, single points of failure, and concentration of control are hallmarks of a system designed for a smaller world. QVAC is built for the world to come. It is the building block of the era of stable intelligence.”
Peer-to-peer functionality is also one of the key components of the SDK. Powered by the Holepunch stack, QVAC SDK includes built-in primitives for decentralized model distribution, delegated inference without centralized infrastructure, and soon peer-to-peer swarms for decentralized training, refinement, and inference. All peer-to-peer behavior is handled transparently and works identically across all platforms, enabling resilient local AI applications that do not rely on centralized services.
Through a single interface, the QVAC SDK supports a growing number of capabilities, including text completion, embeddings, vision, OCR, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, translation and more. Developers can access these capabilities without having to manage separate toolchains or platform-specific integrations. In the coming months and years, Tether will dedicate substantial resources and investments to expanding QVAC’s open source ecosystem to include all necessary functionality, including toolkits specifically designed for robotics and brain-computer interfaces.
As AI becomes embedded in physical systems, infrastructure, and everyday life, the latency and vulnerability of centralized models becomes a technical issue, not just a political one. The launch reflects a broader shift in the way AI is deployed, from cloud-dependent models to approaches that prioritize on-device intelligence. As consumer expectations around speed, privacy and control continue to grow, local AI tools like QVAC SDK aim to provide developers with a new path to building the next generation of intelligent applications.
More information about the QVAC SDK is available at https://qvac.tether.io.
About Tether data
Tether Data, SA de CV (“Tether Data”) is part of Tether’s broader vision to advance freedom, transparency and innovation through technology. Its mission is to enable people and organizations to connect and share information instantly, without unnecessary intermediaries. By creating secure, peer-to-peer systems, Tether Data gives users more control over their data, communications and digital interactions. Tether Data aims to redefine the way information flows across networks by replacing centralized models with a decentralized infrastructure designed for privacy, efficiency and resilience. The company’s goal is to make global connectivity faster, more secure and more private, allowing individuals and institutions to exchange information both freely and securely.
About QVAC
QVAC is Tether Data’s advanced AI research initiative focused on building open, decentralized, and adaptive intelligence systems. Its mission is local AI and infinite intelligence. It is guided by an uncompromising vision of a world where AI lives and learns on every device, empowering individuals and communities rather than concentrating power in corporate data centers.