A Deep Dive into Acurast: The Decentralized Compute Network

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The momentum is real. Acurast is already live with over 70,000 phones across 130+ countries. Acurast is proving that compute can be verifiable, confidential, energy-efficient, and truly decentralized—powered by the phones in our pockets.

We sat down with the Acurast team to explore how they’re redefining compute by turning smartphones into secure, verifiable compute nodes, why decentralization matters more than ever in the AI era, how Acurast is scaling beyond data centers, and what lies ahead for their community-first roadmap in 2025.

Let’s dive in.

If you prefer to listen to our Twitter Space with Acurast’s Founder and President of the Association, Alessandro De Carli, click here. 

1. Acurast is gaining a lot of traction recently. For those just finding out about it, can you explain what Acurast is and why it’s suddenly catching wide attention? 

Acurast is the first Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN) that unlocks the world’s largest untapped compute source that we all have in our pockets: smartphones. The protocol transforms idle phones into a global mesh of verifiable and confidential compute providers - no data centers, no central servers, no gatekeepers. Just secure, on-demand processing by everyone, for everyone.

The core problem Acurast solves is the centralization, inefficiency, and fragility of traditional compute infrastructure. Today’s compute relies on heavy trust assumptions and a dangerous concentration of control in the hands of a few companies globally. This problem is further emphasized due to the increase in AI compute demand and upcoming innovations such as the agentic internet. As compute demand is growing fast, many regions worldwide do not have the infrastructure to spin up data centers. Yet, no one wants to be left behind in the AI game and have a significant disadvantage on the global stage. Furthermore, there is a shortage of compute chips, which are even gate-kept for political pressure that amplifies this race even more.

Meanwhile, billions of dollars’ worth of high-end hardware sits idle in smartphones tucked away in pockets, drawers, or dozing on nightstands.Acurast flips the status quo of compute on its head — providing high-performance, confidential, decentralized compute from a permissionless network of phones distributed across the globe. It leverages hardware backed by billions in R&D (think: Apple and Qualcomm). 

While centralized players fight over scarce chips and permissioned hardware, Acurast is quietly building the future-proof infrastructure that you can become part of before everyone else catches on. We are still early.  

2. Why are smartphones the foundation of a decentralized compute revolution, and what makes this moment so pivotal to get involved?

Acurast gained traction by tapping into an overlooked yet vast reservoir of compute power—smartphones. Everyone carries a powerful compute device in their pocket, with potentially billions more lying idle in drawers, untapped yet fully capable. Annually, a staggering 1.39 billion smartphones are sold globally, dwarfing the mere 13.6 million servers deployed in centralized data centers yearly. This disparity underscores the unmatched scalability and potential reach of smartphone-based decentralized compute.

Moreover, smartphones represent arguably the pinnacle of consumer hardware engineering. To illustrate this point, two-thirds of Apple's revenue stems exclusively from iPhones and iPads, and with Apple investing around $31.5 billion annually into R&D, a substantial portion goes into engineering these precise devices. Consequently, smartphones have unparalleled computational sophistication and reliability, positioning them ideally for a global decentralized compute revolution.

Security isn't merely beneficial in decentralized compute, it’s a must-have. Thankfully, the billions of smartphones circulating worldwide are equipped with cutting-edge Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) that far exceed typical server security. These HSM-backed Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) inherently provide two critical properties:

• Verifiability: Ensuring each device is genuine, preventing fake reports, and validating that computations are authentic and unaltered.
• Confidentiality: Guaranteeing that neither device owners nor external entities can inspect workloads or access sensitive data.

These intrinsic security advantages directly address vulnerabilities prevalent in many existing decentralized compute networks, where trust and integrity often remain uncertain.

Smartphones thus represent a uniquely powerful, secure, and readily scalable backbone for decentralized compute. Given their ubiquity, sophisticated engineering, and security advantages, smartphones are poised to revolutionize the decentralized compute landscape, creating immense opportunities for individuals to contribute and earn from otherwise idle devices.

Now is the pivotal moment to engage—leveraging this untapped resource will position early adopters at the forefront of a rapidly expanding decentralized compute ecosystem.

3. What makes smartphone-based compute not just viable but potentially disruptive to our current thinking about infrastructure and centralized data centers?

Smartphone-based compute uniquely disrupts current infrastructure paradigms by instantly democratizing access to powerful compute resources, especially in regions historically excluded from technological advancements due to the prohibitive costs and infrastructure requirements of centralized data centers. This sudden accessibility enables communities that previously lacked adequate infrastructure to rapidly participate in critical technologies like AI, fundamentally reshaping who can innovate and contribute globally.

Unlike traditional centralized data centers, which require significant capital investments, extensive lead times, and high requirements on existing infrastructure, smartphone-based compute leverages existing, widely available devices to immediately scale and distribute computational capabilities. This accessibility dramatically lowers entry barriers, empowering under-resourced areas to join the digital economy rapidly, unlock new opportunities, and diminish technological disparities.

Smartphone-driven decentralized compute isn’t just an alternative, it’s a powerful force for change. It expands access to innovation by reaching beyond traditional geographic and economic boundaries. In doing so, it shifts the balance of power in technology. This creates a more global and fair innovation ecosystem.

4. With over 70,000 phones already active across 130 countries, how are you scaling this global network, and what does it mean for those looking to participate early?

Thinking about the previously mentioned numbers of 1.39 billion smartphones that are sold globally versus the 13.6 million servers, one can already see the potential of scale when it comes to raw compute power. On top of that, phones are essentially the tech product that is most distributed and accessible throughout the world and poised for unprecedented scale.

What this means for early participants is simple: outsized opportunity. As more developers rely on Acurast for secure, decentralized processing, demand for compute will surge. Those already providing it, early adopters, will be the first to benefit. It’s a rare chance to be part of a foundational layer of infrastructure, just as it starts to accelerate globally.

The network is live, expanding, and rewarding contributors. The earlier you join, the more your role compounds.

5. What are some real-world applications already leveraging Acurast, and how do they validate the long-term potential of Acurast?

Acurast uniquely combines broad accessibility, unparalleled confidentiality, and a robust serverless architecture, making it ideal for innovative use cases previously constrained by centralized or insecure infrastructures.

Historically, decentralized applications (dApps) struggled with determining who hosts their backend, while decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) faced difficulties sourcing compute without traditional payment methods. Acurast resolves these issues by providing secure, decentralized, affordable compute at scale.

Because Acurast is built on a serverless model, tasks are efficiently distributed and scaled across devices, automatically maintaining resilience even if devices go offline. This makes it perfect for confidential hosting of Large Language Models (LLMs), secure on-chain automations crucial to blockchain ecosystems, and distributed web scraping or data collection—addressing privacy and sovereignty constraints.

Additionally, Acurast enables high-performance decentralized compute, such as zero-knowledge (ZK) proof generation and VPN services, traditionally limited by high costs and central control. With over 10,000 deployments already on its testnet, Acurast demonstrates significant organic growth and validates its wide-ranging potential, unlocking transformative innovations across industries.

6. How do you solve the issue of future compute availability? Meaning how can someone who deploys workloads remain assured their workloads will stay running? 

Acurast introduces an innovative concept known as Staked Compute, addressing the critical challenge of ensuring long-term compute availability without central authorities. Traditional decentralized compute faces reliability issues, primarily due to unpredictable hardware availability from individual providers, devices could go offline, lose power, or lose connectivity. While Acurast ensures verifiability and confidentiality through smartphone-integrated Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), these environments alone can't guarantee continuous availability.

Staked Compute solves this limitation by incorporating economic incentives directly into the network protocol. Compute providers are required to stake assets as collateral against their commitments to keep workloads running and earn rewards. This staking creates a powerful incentive mechanism, aligning providers' interests with sustained operational reliability without relying on centralized oversight.

Further enhancing resilience, Acurast has partnered with the University of Zurich to develop a sophisticated reputation system. This reputation mechanism, combined with the economic incentives of Staked Compute, ensures consistent and trustworthy service delivery across the decentralized network.

Acurast’s Staked Compute approach innovatively solves the critical issue of future compute availability by economically incentivizing reliability. It creates an extremely resilient, self-regulating, decentralized compute ecosystem ideal for robust, real-world deployments.

7. What role do partners play in Acurast’s ecosystem, and how do these collaborations accelerate Acurast’s mission?

DePIN is just getting started. As these networks grow and become more relevant, the importance of composability will also increase.

At Acurast, partners play a central role. They help bring real-world use cases to life through Acurast’s powerful decentralized compute network.

With a wide range of compute capabilities, Acurast has built a strong ecosystem of over 45 partners. These include cutting-edge enterprises, agile SMEs, Confidential AI Agents, DePIN innovators, dynamic Web3 projects, and real-time on-chain data providers.

Together, this diverse group is powering a new era of decentralized intelligence—unlocking possibilities that once seemed out of reach.

8. What role does the ACU token play in the network, and how does it support decentralization, security, and utility? 

The ACU token is what makes the entire decentralization of the protocol possible. Decentralization is one of Acurast’s core values and impacts every protocol-related decision. ACU enables users to participate and interact with the protocol with these key functions:

• Network Fees: As a very active orchestration layer (over 250M transactions on testnet) the Acurast network requires transaction fees to avoid spamming and to keep a high quality of service to this crucial component.
• Incentivization of compute provision: Similar to how Bitcoin rewards miners for creating blocks, Acurast is incentivizing compute providers through fixed inflation.
• Staking: The novel concept of Staked Compute allows Acurast to economically secure reliable, verifiable, and widely accessible compute resources through staking collateral. This enables participants, including those without hardware, to earn rewards, delegate stakes, and leverage restacking for enhanced capital efficiency and network governance.
• Settlement: Similar to network fees, ACU acts as a unified settlement token to ensure the reputation and quality of the provided compute, with a burn on settlements to prevent reputation tampering.
• Governance: With an on-chain treasury of over 24% allocation at TGE, which replenishes itself from part of the inflation. With token holders making the protocol and future development-related decisions.

9. Looking at your 2025 roadmap, which upcoming milestones are most exciting for builders, contributors, and early supporters?

Major milestones in the 2025 roadmap include:

• Genesis Mainnet Launch, TGE (Q3 2025).
• Governance Activation for Decentralized Community Involvement.
• Codename Cargo (Compute Containers) for modularized workloads, making serverless deployments even easier to deploy and scale.
• Codename Cray (Compute Clusters) cluster of hundreds of devices enabling high-performance compute tasks capable of running even the largest LLMs available. Effectively mitigating the vertical compute limitation arising from working with phones.

Furthermore, the future roadmap includes:

• Codename Bazaar (Compute Economy), creating an active decentralized compute economy for developers to distribute entire software solutions seamlessly without limitations.
• Codename Rice (Compute Futures), innovating long-term decentralized compute economic strategies. Allowing compute providers to leverage their infrastructure and support their future scaling.

10. Can you give us an insight into your growth strategy in 2025?

Acurast’s growth strategy in 2025 is about activating a network effect at scale, where more phones bring more compute, more compute brings more builders, and more builders bring more value into the ecosystem. It’s a positive-sum loop powered by real-world demand, seamless integrations, and decentralized ownership, creating a compute marketplace flywheel.

Here’s how Acurast is scaling fast—and sustainably:

1. Mainnet Launch → Permissionless, Global Access

With the Genesis Mainnet and TGE launching in Q3 2025, Acurast becomes fully open, decentralized, and permissionless. Anyone with a smartphone can start earning as a compute provider. Anyone with workloads, from solo builders to AI startups, can deploy confidential applications on a decentralized network backed by hundreds of thousands of real, verifiable phones.

Mainnet is Acurast’s on-ramp to true global accessibility, where compute is no longer gatekept by geography, capital, or centralized infrastructure.

2. Seamless Native Integrations with Major Web3 Ecosystems

We’re embedding Acurast directly into the world’s most active blockchain ecosystems, Solana, Ethereum, Polkadot, and beyond, so web3 developers can access decentralized, confidential compute as easily as calling a smart contract.

These native integrations mean:

• Developers can spin up secure compute from within their dApp flows
• Protocols gain censorship-resistant backends
• Ecosystems unlock AI, automation, and zero-knowledge tasks without centralized dependencies

This makes Acurast not just complementary, but critical infrastructure for Web3’s next phase.

3. Expanding Beyond Web3: Serving SMEs and Enterprises

While we’re crypto-native at our core, we’re not limited to Web3. We're actively supporting SMEs and enterprise use cases—especially around confidential AI, confidential compute, and secure edge deployments:

• Allowing enterprises to tap into AI without the fear of exposing business-critical and proprietary data by tapping into confidential AI compute
• Workloads requiring confidential compute without the complexity or cost of standing up traditional cloud infrastructure
• Enterprises in emerging markets lacking access to reliable data centers

Acurast offers these users a confidential, on-demand, scalable, and cost-efficient alternative to centralized compute.

4. Hyper-Onboarding of Smartphones at Global Scale

Our onboarding strategy is rooted in mutual value creation. Initiatives like the Cloud Rebellion, major partnerships, and region-specific programs are designed to scale us from 70,000 devices to over 1 million, converting dormant phones into high-value, secure nodes.

Each new phone adds network supply, but also unlocks new regions and new use cases, especially in areas where traditional compute is inaccessible.

5. Unlocking New Economic Layers

With milestones like:

• Cargo (modular compute containers)
• Cray (clustered high-performance compute)
• Bazaar (open compute marketplace)
• and Rice (long-term compute futures)

We’re not just scaling tech—we’re building an open compute economy, where compute is programmable, tradable, and ownable. Each upgrade compounds utility, revenue, and token demand.

6. Community-Driven Governance & Protocol Expansion

The Acurast community will shape protocol decisions post-mainnet through on-chain governance and a self-replenishing treasury. This turns users into stakeholders, and stakeholders into contributors.

In short: Acurast's 2025 growth strategy creates a flywheel:

More devices → more demand → more utility → more contributors → more value.

And at the center of that flywheel is a single insight: you don’t need a data center to be part of the future of compute—just your phone.

Now is the time to join.

11. What is the best way for someone new to get involved in the Acurast community today?

To participate effectively, community members should:

• Use your phone and provide compute with the Acurast Processors
• Engage actively through Acurast’s community initiatives like Cloud Rebellion.
• Contribute to ecosystem growth by developing decentralized apps or collaborating on innovative use cases

To join the Acurast community:

• Cloud Rebellion: https://rebellion.acurast.com 
• Website: https://acurast.com/ 
• Docs: https://docs.acurast.com/ 
• Twitter: https://x.com/Acurast 
• Discord: https://discord.com/invite/wqgC6b6aKe

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