Tether Academy

• Role: Curriculum architect and engineering writer, building the academy and authoring the lessons
• Status: V1, QVAC track live

Watch the demo on YouTube · Try the academy

Background

Over the past few years, Tether has become one of the largest stablecoin issuers. Their main product (USDT) is more useful than 99.9% of all blockchain products combined, and their revenue exceeds that of most major banks.

As we are all aware, Tether has recently expanded into other verticals, including P2P and open-source AI solutions. Tether bets that the future lies in private, local, open-source models running on user devices, calling this strategy the "Stable Intelligence Era."

Goal

My answer to this opportunity is a fresh Codecademy-style learning center for their full product suite. If my instinct is correct, this company will not stop at one product. They are going to expand. This is why having a place where both humans and agents can learn about their tech will become extremely valuable.

The current MVP covers 70 QVAC lessons with 18 chapters dedicated to each capability area, including model loading, image manipulation, and voice assistance. The goal of this version is for people to get familiar with the concept and receive feedback from the Tether team. If there's enough interest, I will dedicate a significant chunk of my time to this project alone.

Setup

1. Prerequisites

• Node.js 20.18+ (Node 20 LTS works, Node 22 also fine)
• npm 10+ (pnpm 11 also works on Node 22.13+)

2. Install dependencies

From the project root:

npm install

3. Start the dev server

npm run dev

The dev server runs Turbopack with HMR. For a webpack fallback, use npm run dev:webpack. To start clean, use npm run dev:clean.

Build

The site is a static export. The full pipeline runs the lesson sync and the vendored-example verifier before next build:

npm run build

For a quick visual check without the prebuild:

npm run build:dev

Output goes to out/. Drop the directory on any static host.