Tether, the issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin USDT, has announced a new developer grants program with no cap on total payouts, aimed at funding local-first artificial intelligence and open payments infrastructure. CEO Paolo Ardoino revealed the program alongside a warning about the growing risks of cloud-based AI agents, emphasizing Tether’s shift toward self-sovereign, device-native AI that does not rely on external servers.
The program pays individual developers $1,500 to $4,000 per completed task, in either USDT or Bitcoin (BTC). It focuses on four key areas: core library development for Tether’s local AI platform QVAC, its Wallet Development Kit (WDK) for embedding self-custodial wallets into applications, technical documentation and onboarding resources, and research into decentralization, edge AI, peer-to-peer networks and cryptography. “If you can build something that runs locally, stores value directly and doesn’t depend on external providers, we fund it,” Ardoino stated.
The move aligns Tether with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who recently published a detailed blog post about his own migration away from cloud-based AI, citing security threats from new AI agents. Buterin highlighted the OpenClaw framework, where agents can modify system settings and exfiltrate data, and noted that 15% of agent skills contain hidden commands sending user data to external servers. Tether’s AI research group has already demonstrated the viability of local models: its QVAC MedPsy-1.7B scored 62.62 on medical benchmarks, outperforming Google’s four-times-larger MedGemma-1.5-4B-it by 11.42 points, while QVAC MedPsy-4B scored 70.54, beating Google’s 27-billion-parameter model. On real‑world clinical tasks, QVAC MedPsy-4B reached 58.00 vs. Google’s 42.00, all while using up to 3.2 times fewer tokens.
Beyond AI, the grants target the Wallet Development Kit, enabling developers to generate keys locally, sign transactions and move funds without custodial services or hosted APIs. Tether has previously granted $100,000 to the BTC Pay Server Foundation and $250,000 to OpenSats for Bitcoin development, and has committed approximately CHF 5 million ($5.38 million) to student education grants through 2030. Applications for the new program are already open, with no limit on total disbursements.
