Acurast: Decentralized Serverless Cloud

What is Acurast

Friends, imagine that each of us carries a tiny supercomputer in our pocket—our smartphone. Most of the time, the powerful computing capabilities of these phones are left idle. Acurast (project abbreviation: ACU) acts like a smart "steward," aiming to connect billions of idle smartphones worldwide, transforming them into a massive, decentralized "supercomputing farm."

Simply put, Acurast is a Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN). You can think of it as a sharing economy platform, but instead of sharing cars or rooms, it shares the underutilized computing power in your phone. Developers who need computing resources to run their applications—such as AI models, smart contracts on blockchains, or data processing for IoT devices—can "rent" this computing power from the Acurast network. And for those of us with smartphones, simply installing an app allows us to contribute our idle computing power and earn rewards in return.

Its target users are very broad, including developers who need large amounts of computing resources (whether for traditional internet applications, Web3 apps on blockchains, or emerging AI and IoT projects), as well as ordinary users who want to earn income by sharing their phone's idle resources.

Project Vision and Value Proposition

Acurast's vision is ambitious—it aims to fundamentally change our perception of "cloud computing." The cloud services we use today are mostly concentrated in the data centers of a few large companies, which is like putting all your eggs in one basket: it's prone to problems and can lead to issues with data privacy and ownership.

The core problem Acurast wants to solve is this centralized, inefficient, and fragile traditional computing infrastructure. It believes that since each of us owns a powerful smartphone, why not aggregate these distributed computing capabilities into a network owned and operated by "the people"? This way, computing resources are no longer monopolized by a few giants, but become more democratized, scalable, and secure.

Compared to similar projects, Acurast stands out in several ways:

• Utilizing existing devices: It doesn't require users to buy expensive dedicated hardware, but leverages the smartphones we already own, greatly lowering the participation threshold and tapping into billions of potential computing resources.
• Verifiability and confidentiality: It uses the built-in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) in smartphones, which act like a highly secure "safe" inside your phone, ensuring that computations are trustworthy and data remains confidential—even the phone owner can't peek inside.
• Community-first: The project emphasizes community participation and benefit in token distribution and governance, striving for true decentralization.

Technical Features

The technical core of Acurast lies in how it transforms globally distributed smartphones into a unified, reliable computing network. Its main technical features include:

• Smartphone-driven decentralized computing: This is the foundation of Acurast. It turns idle smartphones (including Android and iOS devices) into computing providers, forming a vast distributed network without relying on traditional data centers.
• Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs): This is the key technology for secure and confidential computation in Acurast. TEEs are secure areas within smartphone hardware that isolate sensitive data and code, ensuring that computation tasks executed within them cannot be tampered with or leaked. Think of it as an encrypted "black box"—tasks run inside, results come out, but the process remains unseen and untouchable.
• High-performance Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain: Acurast has its own Layer 1 blockchain, which acts as the network's "brain," coordinating the needs of computation task requesters and providers, and ensuring the network's operation and settlement. Proof of Stake (PoS) is a consensus mechanism that secures the network and validates transactions through token holding and staking, rather than the energy-intensive mining of Bitcoin (Proof of Work).
• Modular architecture: The Acurast network is designed to be modular, divided into three main layers:
  • Consensus layer: Responsible for network coordination, reputation management, and proof services, ensuring fairness in task allocation and result verification.
  • Execution layer: The layer where computation tasks are actually executed, utilizing smartphone TEEs.
  • Application layer: The interface for developers and users to interact with the network.
• Extensive interoperability: Acurast supports not only the Web3 ecosystem (such as EVM, WASM, Substrate), but can also interact with existing Web2 applications (like Amazon Lambda and Google Cloud Functions), enabling a broader range of use cases.
• Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS) consensus mechanism: Acurast adopts Nominated Proof of Stake (NPoS) as its consensus mechanism, a variant of PoS that allows token holders to nominate validators to maintain the network, increasing decentralization and security.

Tokenomics

The core of the Acurast project is its native token ACU, which plays a vital role throughout the network, acting as the "lifeblood" connecting all participants.

• Token Basics

  • Token symbol: ACU
  • Issuing chain: Acurast's own Layer 1 Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain.
  • Total supply: The total supply of ACU is set at 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) tokens.
  • Inflation/Burn: To keep the network vibrant and incentivized, ACU will have an adaptive annual inflation rate of 1% to 5%. Additionally, 30% of ACU will be burned in each settlement transaction, helping to increase token scarcity.
  • Current and future circulation: The initial token generation event (TGE) and mainnet launch are planned for Q3 2025, with an initial supply of 1,000,000,000 ACU.

• Token Utility

  • Network fees: Any operation on the Acurast network requires ACU as transaction fees, ensuring the network runs smoothly.
  • Settlement: ACU is the unified settlement token for computing service fees in the network. When developers use computing resources, they pay ACU, and smartphone users providing computing power receive ACU rewards.
  • Staking: Computing providers (Processors) and regular token holders can stake ACU to provide economic security for the network and earn rewards. Staking is like locking up your tokens to show support for the network and participate in its security.
  • Governance: ACU holders can participate in protocol governance, voting on community proposals to collectively decide the protocol's future direction, ensuring decentralization and long-term evolution.

• Token Distribution and Unlocking Information

  • Acurast's token distribution follows a "community-first" strategy.
  • Community and community support: Nearly 70% of tokens are allocated to the community or for community-supporting activities, including the community treasury, TGE community activation, operational funds, and liquidity provision.
  • Early supporters: Only 6.5% of tokens are allocated to early supporters, indicating the project's commitment to a fair launch.
  • Team and advisors: Team and advisor tokens have the longest lock-up periods, aligning them with the project's long-term development goals.

Team, Governance, and Funding

• Core Members and Team Characteristics

  • The founder and chairman of the Acurast Association is Alessandro De Carli.
  • The team is known for its rigorous technical expertise and strong execution, not only excelling in theory but also delivering practical results, such as successfully running advanced LLMs (large language models) and providing security for key projects in the Tezos ecosystem.

• Governance Mechanism

  • After mainnet launch, Acurast will implement on-chain governance, allowing community members to participate in protocol decision-making.
  • ACU token holders will be able to vote on various proposals, guiding the development of the protocol and its components, ensuring true decentralization and future-oriented evolution.

• Treasury and Funding

  • Acurast has raised over $5.5 million through grants and private funding, and plans to raise another $5.4 million via an initial token offering (ICO) on CoinList.
  • The project has also received $9.4 million in support, including Polkadot grants.
  • After mainnet launch, Acurast will establish a self-sustaining treasury to support community-driven governance and ongoing protocol development.

Roadmap

Acurast's growth and future plans clearly outline its development trajectory:

• Key Historical Milestones and Events

  • 2022: Project founded.
  • 2023: Acurast testnet and Canary Network launched.
  • Q1 2024: Expanded support for more Android phones.
  • Q2 2024: Launched "Cloud Rebellion" initiative and introduced NodeJS runtime for verifiable Acurast runtime.
  • By May 2025: Incentivized testnet has attracted over 70,000 phones across more than 130 countries.
  • To date: Testnet has processed over 422 million transactions and more than 35,000 on-chain deployments, successfully securing $90 million for the xcBTC project and $120 million for the Youves project.

• Future Key Plans and Milestones (2025)

  • Q3 2025: Planned Genesis Mainnet Launch and initial token offering (TGE).
  • After mainnet launch:
    • Governance activation: Launch decentralized community governance, enabling community participation in decision-making.
    • Codename "Cargo" (Compute Containers): Introduce modular workload compute containers for more convenient and scalable serverless deployment.
    • Codename "Cray" (Compute Clusters): Develop compute clusters composed of hundreds of devices to support high-performance computing tasks, including running large language models (LLMs), addressing the vertical limitations of smartphone computing power.
    • Codename "Bazaar" (Compute Economy): Create a vibrant decentralized compute economy, allowing developers to seamlessly distribute complete software solutions.
    • Codename "Rice" (Compute Futures): Innovate long-term decentralized compute economy strategies, enabling compute providers to leverage their infrastructure and support future expansion.
  • 2025 overall growth strategy: Aims to activate network effects, forming a positive cycle—more phones bring more computing power, more computing power attracts more developers, and more developers bring greater value to the ecosystem.

Common Risk Reminders

Any emerging blockchain project comes with certain risks, and Acurast is no exception. It's important to understand these potential risks before participating:

• Technical and Security Risks

  • Computation stability: Acurast relies on a large number of smartphones for computing power. Factors such as hardware performance, network bandwidth, and battery life may affect computation stability, causing resource fluctuations and impacting overall platform performance.
  • Vulnerabilities in Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs): Although TEEs provide strong security, unknown vulnerabilities or compromised implementations could affect the network's confidentiality and verifiability.
  • Network attacks: Any blockchain network may face various attacks, such as DDoS or Sybil attacks, which could disrupt normal network operations.

• Economic Risks

  • Tokenomics design: If the ACU token's economic model is poorly designed—such as incentives being too high or too low—it may affect user and provider participation, cause severe price volatility, or even disrupt the platform's ecosystem balance.
  • Market volatility: The cryptocurrency market is highly volatile. ACU token prices may fluctuate sharply due to market sentiment, macroeconomic factors, regulatory changes, and other influences, posing investment risks.
  • Competition risk: The decentralized computing sector is evolving, and Acurast faces competition from other DePIN projects and traditional cloud computing giants.

• Compliance and Operational Risks

  • Regulatory uncertainty: Global regulations for cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects are still evolving. Acurast may face changing regulatory requirements in different countries and regions, which could impact its operations and development. The project has published a MiCA whitepaper to address EU regulations.
  • User adoption: Despite Acurast's grand vision, its success ultimately depends on attracting enough computing providers and developers to create strong network effects. If user adoption falls short, project growth may be hindered.

Please note: The above risk reminders are not exhaustive. Cryptocurrency investment is highly risky. Be sure to conduct thorough due diligence and make decisions according to your own risk tolerance. This article does not constitute investment advice.

Verification Checklist

• Block explorer contract address: Since Acurast is its own Layer 1 blockchain, it will have its own block explorer for querying transactions and token information. The mainnet is not yet live (planned for Q3 2025), so there is currently no mainnet contract address.
• GitHub activity: Acurast maintains several active repositories on GitHub, such as
  acurast-cli
  (command-line tool) and
  acurast-substrate
  (Acurast's Substrate chain implementation), indicating ongoing code development and maintenance by the project team.

Project Summary

Acurast is an innovative blockchain project that seeks to build a decentralized, verifiable, and confidential computing network by leveraging the idle computing power of billions of smartphones worldwide. Its core value lies in addressing the centralization, inefficiency, and lack of trust in current cloud computing, providing a more resilient, scalable, and democratized computing infrastructure for emerging fields like Web3, AI, and IoT.

Through its unique DePIN model and use of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), Acurast aims to enable everyone to participate in the global sharing of computing resources—whether as a provider earning rewards or as a developer accessing secure and efficient computing services. Its "community-first" tokenomics and on-chain governance also reflect a commitment to decentralization.

However, as an early-stage project (mainnet and token TGE planned for Q3 2025), Acurast faces challenges such as technical stability, market competition, and regulatory uncertainty. Its success will depend on overcoming these obstacles and attracting enough users and developers to create strong network effects.

In summary, Acurast offers a compelling vision: reshaping the future of computing through the devices in our pockets. For those interested in decentralized computing and the DePIN sector, Acurast is certainly a project worth watching. But remember, this article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Always do your own research (DYOR) before making any decisions.