Tether’s MDK Gains Broad Industry Backing to Accelerate the Next Generation of Bitcoin Mining Automation

15 mining companies, ASIC manufacturers, and pools are adopting a shared open layer designed to make mining infrastructure interoperable and ready for the next generation of automation and AI

24 October 2026 – Tether, the largest company in the digital asset industry, announced today that leading Bitcoin mining companies* have committed to working together to build and maintain integrations with its Mining Development Kit (MDK). They include mining operators, ASIC manufacturers, and mining pools. MDK is an open-source framework that makes mining infrastructure interoperable and supports the next generation of AI-driven automation. The initiative brings 15 industry participants around a common infrastructure layer, enabling developers to build applications and autonomous systems that work across different mining environments without requiring separate integrations for every manufacturer or platform.

The commitments move one of the world’s largest distributed computing industries toward a common infrastructure layer at a moment when AI and automation are beginning to change how data centers are operated. Instead of every new application having to be rebuilt for different machines and providers, MDK is designed to give developers a consistent way to interact with infrastructure across the industry.

A large mining site can have thousands of machines from different manufacturers, connected to different pools and managed through different software. Most of those systems were not built to work together, so operators end up managing them separately and developers keep rebuilding the same integrations for each one. That gets harder as a site grows, and adding new hardware or software can mean another custom integration. Tools built for one vendor often cannot be used across the rest of the fleet. It also limits how much operators can automate, especially as they start looking at AI to help manage more of the day-to-day operation.

An AI agent can monitor machines, identify problems, optimize performance, and eventually take action autonomously. But it cannot effectively manage thousands of machines if every piece of infrastructure communicates differently. Before autonomous systems can operate physical infrastructure at scale, the infrastructure itself needs a common way to be understood and controlled. MDK provides that foundation.

Each participating company will build and maintain an MDK Worker: a translation layer that connects its own hardware, mining pool, or system to MDK. The Worker translates that company’s existing interface into a common language that applications built on MDK can understand. Companies do not have to replace their technology or surrender control of their systems. They simply expose the functions they choose through the same open interface.

That distinction is central to the model. MDK is not an attempt to make every manufacturer or mining pool operate the same way. It is designed to make different systems interoperable.

Once that layer exists, developers can build an application, monitoring system, or AI agent against MDK rather than separately engineering it for every manufacturer and pool. As more companies maintain their own Workers, the same application can operate across a growing portion of the mining industry. The result is infrastructure that becomes easier to automate, easier to build on, and less dependent on any single vendor.

“We are entering a period where software will increasingly operate physical infrastructure, not simply report on it,” said Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether. “That does not work at scale if every machine speaks a different language. Mining is one of the clearest examples of this problem today. MDK gives companies a way to keep control of their own technology while creating the common foundation developers and autonomous systems need to work across it.”

Tether’s QVAC mining agent is already operating directly on MDK, providing an early demonstration of the model: an AI application interacting with mining infrastructure through a common layer rather than requiring a new integration for every system it encounters. The initial 15 commitments are an early step toward a broader ecosystem. MDK remains open to any manufacturer, mining pool, operator, or developer, with additional Workers, applications, and tools expected as more of the industry builds on the shared foundation.

Across Bitcoin, AI, communications, energy and financial infrastructure, Tether is focused on reducing the fragmentation that prevents technology from operating at global scale. MDK brings that approach to mining, creating an open layer on which companies can build the tools and autonomous systems that will operate the industry next.

MDK will reach version 0.11 at the Plan ₿ Forum in Lugano on October 23–24, with its first stable 1.0 release targeted by the end of 2026. Developers do not need to wait for 1.0. MDK is open source today, allowing manufacturers, mining pools, operators, and developers to begin testing integrations, building Workers, and developing applications through the repository and documentation.

*Note: The complete alphabetical list of participating mining companies, ASIC manufacturers, and pools follows below:

• ACME Swisstech
• Bitdeer
• BITMAIN
• Canaan Inc.
• Elektron Energy
• EMCD
• F2Pool
• Foundry Digital
• Heatbit Inc.
• Luxor Technology
• MicroBT
• OCEAN (Bitcoin Ocean, LLC)
• Proto (Block, Inc.)
• SpiderPool
• Stratum V2