Acurast

Acurast is a decentralized compute network built on a simple but counterintuitive premise: the world's most abundant and security-hardened computing devices are not data center servers—they are smartphones. The project turns consumer mobile phones into a global mesh of verifiable cloud processors, offering developers and enterprises access to confidential, serverless compute without relying on any centralized cloud provider.

How It Works

When a user installs the Acurast Processor application on a compatible smartphone, that device joins the network as a Compute Provider. Workloads submitted by developers are scheduled across these devices and executed inside the phone's Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)—a hardware-isolated region, sometimes backed by a dedicated Hardware Security Module (HSM), that modern smartphones include by design. The TEE ensures that neither the device owner nor external observers can inspect or tamper with the running computation. After execution, a cryptographic attestation is generated and posted to the Acurast blockchain, proving that specific code ran unmodified on genuine hardware with confidential inputs.

This combination of verifiability and confidentiality distinguishes Acurast from other decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) compute networks, most of which coordinate hardware without being able to cryptographically prove what actually ran on it. The architecture is formalized in a peer-reviewed paper published on arXiv in March 2025 ("Acurast: Decentralized Serverless Cloud," arXiv:2503.15654), which describes the three consensus-layer components underpinning the network: an orchestrator that matches jobs to devices, a reputation engine that scores provider reliability, and an attestation service that validates TEE-backed execution proofs.

Acurast's reputation engine was developed in collaboration with the University of Zurich. Providers that consistently deliver verified executions earn higher reputation scores, which feed into the network's economic security model.

Developer Experience

From a developer's perspective, Acurast operates as serverless infrastructure. Workloads are written in Node.js-compatible environments and can include web servers, REST API integrations, scheduled automation jobs, Telegram bots, headless browsers via Puppeteer, WebAssembly modules, and LLM inference tasks. Developers submit jobs to the network, specify scheduling parameters and resource requirements, and pay in ACU tokens. The network handles matching, execution, and delivery of verifiable results.

The platform targets several practical use cases. For Web3 applications, this includes decentralized oracle services, blockchain indexing, cross-chain asset management automation, and zero-knowledge proof generation. For enterprise workloads, it enables confidential data analytics and secure API processing where data must not be exposed to a compute provider. The network also supports Acurast Vibe Code and Deploy, a product that lets users generate and host AI-created web applications on decentralized compute.

Scale and Ecosystem Reach

As of mid-2025, the Acurast network had onboarded over 250,000 compute units spanning more than 130 countries, making it one of the most geographically distributed compute networks in operation. The testnet processed more than 256 million transactions before the Genesis Mainnet launch targeted for Q3 2025.

Acurast integrates natively with multiple blockchain ecosystems—Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tezos, Polkadot, and others—allowing developers on those networks to call Acurast compute jobs as easily as interacting with a smart contract. The project operates as a Polkadot parachain, giving it shared security and cross-chain messaging capabilities within the Polkadot ecosystem, while its attestation and settlement layer connects outward to other chains.

Solana Integration

Acurast's relationship with the Solana ecosystem deepened in May 2025 with the launch of Acurast Processor Lite on the Solana Mobile platform. This allows Solana Mobile device owners to contribute their phones to the Acurast compute network directly, turning Saga and Chapter 2 devices into Compute Providers earning ACU rewards. Acurast is building native Solana integrations so that developers building on-chain programs or off-chain automation for Solana can access decentralized, confidential compute through the Acurast protocol.

The ACU Token

The network's native token is ACU, with an initial supply of one billion tokens. ACU serves three core functions: paying for compute (network fees), securing the network (staking), and participating in protocol governance.

The protocol implements a 5% fixed annual inflation rate, adjustable between 1% and 5% by governance vote, distributed as follows: 70% to the Staked Compute Pool, 10% to the general Compute Pool, 15% to the on-chain Treasury, and 5% to Collators who run the parachain infrastructure.

Staked Compute is the network's primary economic mechanism for compute quality assurance. Rather than requiring every participant to own hardware, it allows ACU holders to delegate stake to reputable Compute Providers, sharing in rewards proportional to provider performance. This model ties the protocol's inflation directly to verified compute output rather than block production alone.

Token allocations heavily favor community and ecosystem development—approximately 70% of the initial supply is directed toward the Community Treasury, Community Activation programs, operational funds, and liquidity. Early backers hold a capped 6.5% allocation to preserve a fair launch profile. Team and advisor tokens vest over 36 months with a 6-month lock-up cliff.

Acurast raised $5.4 million in an oversubscribed public token sale on CoinList in May 2025. The Swiss Association operating Acurast has undergone FINMA review with no regulatory concerns flagged.

The network also operates a canary deployment (cACU) and a community engagement token called MIST, distributed through the Cloud Rebellion program—a gamified onboarding campaign where participants earn rewards for completing quests, onboarding devices, and deploying applications.

Team and Roadmap

Acurast was co-founded by Alessandro De Carli and Pascal Brun, who bring backgrounds from institutions including Northrop Grumman, UBS, Credit Suisse, SwissRe, and Citigroup, with expertise spanning mobile security, confidential computing, and distributed systems.

The near-term roadmap centers on four named capability expansions: Cargo (Compute Containers) for modularized workload packaging, Cray (Compute Clusters) enabling clusters of hundreds of devices for high-performance tasks like large model inference, Bazaar (a decentralized compute marketplace), and Rice (long-term compute futures for predictable capacity planning). The Genesis Mainnet launch and Token Generation Event were targeted for Q3 2025, marking the transition to a fully permissionless, community-governed network.

For Solana builders, Acurast represents a production-grade route to decentralized off-chain computation with hardware-verifiable guarantees—filling a gap that neither centralized cloud providers nor standard oracle networks address for applications where confidentiality and censorship-resistance matter.