Tether Frontier Hackathon Track

Tether is putting up an additional 10,000 USDt for Colosseum Frontier builders who integrate QVAC into their project.

This is a side track running alongside the main hackathon — meaning if your project qualifies, you compete for both the main Frontier prizes and this $10k on top.

What is QVAC?

QVAC is Tether's decentralized, local-first AI platform — a complete SDK for running AI models directly on any device, without routing data through a centralized cloud. Think of it as the infrastructure layer for sovereign intelligence: your AI runs privately, locally, and without permission, on Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS, all from the same API.

Where most AI tools require cloud infrastructure, API keys, and subscriptions, QVAC eliminates central points of failure entirely. It uses a hardware-agnostic engine built on Vulkan API, meaning it runs on any GPU. Models load locally, inference is instant, and your users' data never leaves their device.

The SDK ships with a full suite of AI capabilities out of the box:

• LLM inference — text generation and chat, including multimodal (text + image) via @qvac/llm-llamacpp

• Text embeddings & RAG — semantic search, clustering, and retrieval-augmented generation via @qvac/embed-llamacpp

• Translation — offline neural machine translation across languages via @qvac/translation-nmtcpp

• Speech-to-text — automatic speech recognition via @qvac/transcription-whispercpp and @qvac/transcription-parakeet (with speaker diarization)

• Text-to-speech — speech synthesis via @qvac/tts-onnx

• OCR — optical character recognition from images via @qvac/ocr-onnx

Tether has also introduced WDK (wdk.tether.io), an open-source toolkit designed to streamline and enhance the development and deployment of non-custodial wallets, helping builders work more efficiently and securely

Get started in minutes:

npm install @qvac/sdk

Full docs at docs.qvac.tether.io

Requirements

To be eligible for the Tether side track prize, your submission must:

1. Be a valid submission to the Colosseum Frontier hackathon (submitted before the May 11 deadline)

2. Meaningfully integrate QVAC SDK into the core functionality of your project — not as a wrapper or demo, but as a functional component of what you're building

3. Include a public GitHub repo with a working demo or video walkthrough

4. Submit through this Superteam Earn listing by the same May 11 deadline

What counts as a meaningful integration? Your project should use at least one QVAC capability — whether that's local LLM inference, embeddings, speech-to-text, translation, or OCR — in a way that directly serves your product's users. The integration must work offline or on-device, which is the point of QVAC.

How Winners Are Chosen

Submissions will be evaluated by Tether and Superteam Georgia across four criteria:

• Technical depth of QVAC integration (40%) — Does the project make real use of QVAC's local AI capabilities? Is the integration meaningful, or surface-level?

• Product value (30%) — Does the project solve a real problem? Would someone actually use this?

• Innovation (20%) — Is this a novel use of local/decentralized AI? Does it explore territory that cloud-based AI couldn't serve as well?

• Demo quality (10%) — Is the submission clearly presented, reproducible, and well-documented?

Winners will be announced by May 13, 2026.

Resources

• QVAC homepage: https://qvac.tether.io

• Documentation: https://docs.qvac.tether.io

• GitHub: https://github.com/tetherto/qvac

• Discord: https://discord.com/invite/tetherdev

• Quickstart: https://docs.qvac.tether.io/sdk/getting-started/quickstart/

Questions? Reach out on Telegram: @mariamgoya