On October 24, Tether announced that fifteen mining companies, ASIC manufacturers, and pools had agreed to build and maintain integrations with the Mining Development Kit (MDK), an open-source framework for Bitcoin mining infrastructure. The backers span four ASIC makers (BITMAIN, Canaan, MicroBT, Bitdeer), six pools and operators (F2Pool, Foundry Digital, Luxor Technology, SpiderPool, OCEAN, EMCD), energy provider Elektron Energy, hardware makers Heatbit and ACME Swisstech, the Stratum V2 pool protocol, and Proto, Block’s mining-chip and rig effort. Read as a group, the names cover every side of the market, with one notable omission: BITMAIN the manufacturer is present, but its AntPool arm is not, and neither are ViaBTC nor Braiins.
One interface, many vendors
Each participant commits to maintain an MDK Worker, a translation layer that exposes that company’s machines or pools through one shared interface. Developers then build an application, monitoring tool, or AI agent against MDK once instead of writing a separate integration for every vendor. The problem this solves is concrete. A mining site often runs thousands of machines from different manufacturers, connected to different pools and managed through separate tools. Without a common interface, an AI agent that wants to monitor or tune the fleet has to learn each vendor’s protocol individually.
Tether describes the arrangement as interoperability: companies keep their own technology and expose only the functions they choose. Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s chief executive, said the company expects software to “increasingly operate physical infrastructure, not simply report on it,” and that a common layer is what lets developers and autonomous systems work across the industry.
Still pre-1.0
The software is early. MDK reached version 0.11 at the Plan ₿ Forum in Lugano on October 23-24, and Tether targets a stable 1.0 release by the end of 2026. The code is open source today, so developers can start building and testing before that release ships. Until 1.0 lands, the kit is versioned pre-release software, and operators treat a beta differently from a production standard.
What the announcement leaves open
A commitment to build a Worker is not a shipped integration. Tether gives no per-company timeline, no figure for how much hashrate the participating pools control, and no count of live Workers beyond its own QVAC mining agent, which already runs on MDK. The company calls the fifteen commitments “an early step toward a broader ecosystem.” The release lists no number of Workers live today beyond that single agent.
Who sets the roadmap
MDK is open source, and any manufacturer, pool, operator, or developer can join. Tether still funds the project, runs the reference implementation, and supplied the first application in QVAC, so one company sets the roadmap for a layer the rest of the industry is being asked to adopt. Three signals will show whether MDK becomes a shared standard or a single company’s layer: whether the named pools route real hashrate through their Workers, whether a large pool that did not sign on (AntPool, ViaBTC, or Braiins) joins, and whether 1.0 lands before the end of 2026.
Adapted from 15 Mining Companies Back Tether's MDK as AI Agents Move Into Bitcoin Data Centers.