Tether’s EVO Engineers Take 4th in Global Brain-Computer Interface Challenge

12 February 2026 – Tether, the largest company in the digital assets industry, today announced that its frontier technology division, Tether EVO, demonstrated the superb quality of its local-first brain-computer interface (BCI) AI systems for translating neural signals into text under real-world simulated constraints, placing twice in the top five, over 466 participants, in the Brain-to-Text ’25 Kaggle Competition, which included several prominent universities across the world.

Tether EVO’s approach prioritises local execution, robustness to noisy inputs, and efficient representation of high-dimensional neural data, avoiding reliance on continuous cloud connectivity. These design choices reflect a broader focus on AI systems that remain usable in environments where latency, privacy, and infrastructure constraints are non-negotiable. 

The competition required participants to convert 256 channels of raw neural activity into clear, fluent text without precise time-alignment data. Tether EVO’s success in decoding complex neural signals and Electrocorticography (ECoG) recordings, competing against global data science teams and leading AI research institutions, demonstrates that high-performance reasoning can be achieved without the massive, centralised compute power typically associated with “Big Tech” models.

​By securing a fourth-place finish, Tether EVO demonstrated that its local-first AI approach can perform competitively on one of the most complex data challenges in machine learning, decoding neural signals into usable text.

“At Tether, we believe that the next frontier of human evolution is the ability to leverage the full potential of machine learning and AI, paired with the uniqueness of our brain, ensuring full control remains in the hands of the user, rather than in centralized datacenters that could access to people’s most intimate thoughts,” said Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether. “Securing a top position in this global competition is more than a technical win for our engineers. Rather, it is a proof of concept for our wider mission. We are building the tech infrastructure layer for the future of society that empowers human evolution, leveraging the most advanced AI techniques, while preserving people’s right to freedom, privacy, and self-sovereignty.”

This commitment to open data and peer-to-peer intelligence ensures that, as AI evolves, it remains a tool for empowerment rather than a mechanism for centralised control.

About Tether EVO

​Tether Evo is Tether’s frontier technology division, dedicated to the intersection of biology and machine intelligence. Specialising in Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) and neuroprosthetics, Tether Evo builds local-first, high-performance systems designed to empower individuals and preserve personal autonomy in an increasingly centralised world.