PANews reported on February 12 that Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino stated they are testing a local AI assistant called QVAC. This assistant supports multiple skills through MCP integration, collaborates with Asana in demonstration use cases, and achieves 100% local inference and decision-making on a laptop GPU configured with "below-average" performance. Ardoino stated that QVAC will soon be released as open source, positioned as a local AI tool for ordinary users.