Acurast: Revolutionizing Serverless Cloud with DePIN — How Spare Mobile Phones Could Challenge Traditional Cloud Providers

How far are we, as regular Internet users, from becoming contributors to a secure, trustless, and permissionless cloud provider?

The answer: Just one second-hand smartphone away.

Wait, is such an exciting concept of a DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network), a robust alternative to traditional centralized cloud computing platforms, actually VIABLE in reality?

Yes. Researchers from the University of Zurich’s Communication Systems Group, in collaboration with the Acurast Association, have unveiled groundbreaking results in their study ‘Performance Analysis of Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks and Centralized Clouds’.

Key findings indicate that Acurast has the potential to perform computationally intensive tasks more efficiently AND in a more cost-efficient manner than traditional cloud services like Google Cloud and Amazon AWS.

The full research paper is publicly available HERE and has been accepted at the upcoming DePIN Workshop of the International Conference on Blockchain Technology (ICBC) 2024.

In this exclusive interview, Alessandro De Carli, the visionary behind Acurast, shares how the distributed serverless cloud service they are building can achieve distributed computation by leveraging smartphones as part of a DePIN.

What inspired the creation of Acurast, and what are its core objectives?

We started three years ago with the development of a verifiable oracle that would leverage the secure element of mobile phones. This gave us the foundation for Acurast: the verifiable compute. We soon realized the real disruptive power of the technology lies in the decentralized serverless use case, because mobile devices are way more power efficient for the same level of compute when comparing to servers. And not only that, compared to servers, they also have a lower acquisition for the same, if not better compute power and provide best-in class security which translates to confidentiality.

Acurast’s goal is to become the largest cloud and go-to solution for any developer looking for compute. This is achieved by the unstoppable scale of the crowd providing compute with their mobile phones distributed around the globe.

Can you share about the founding team’s background and what brought you together to work on Acurast? How does the diverse expertise within your team contribute to the success of Acurast?

Part of the Acurast team consists of experienced mobile security engineers that successfully built up and serviced some of the largest companies worldwide such a Jefferies, various National Banks, Fortune 500 companies, and Nuclear facilities with software securing their mobile infrastructure. Since 2015 this team started to market this knowledge also in the crypto space with open source projects such as AirGap.

Another important part of the Team and Advisors has a close tie to Academia having worked and contributed to research early-on what later became the Bitcoin Lightning network. All of this expertise and network now culminates near-to perfectly in Acurast.

How do you explain the concept of decentralized physical infrastructure networks, with Acurast as an example, to someone unfamiliar with blockchain or decentralization?

In a nutshell the idea is to allow any participant to provide and be part of the infrastructure required by a use case. For Acurast this translates to people being able to upcycle spare mobile phones and dedicate them as compute units for a decentralized serverless cloud. This is exciting because the superiority in compute per watt provided by smart phones makes this offering cheaper and more secure compared to existing centralized clouds, furthermore the permissionless nature of the protocol allows the offered compute to scale to sizes unthinkable with centralized setups.

What do you think of the current DePIN industry?

The idea of running infrastructure in a decentralized way is not per se new, one could argue that the largest, most established DePIN is the bitcoin network. However, the current DePIN movement is more about expanding this rationale to more and more use cases and this is exciting. From crowd sourcing data, to running the largest compute cloud in the world, all are use cases with immense disruption potential. Ultimately, I believe that this movement has the power to dethrone existing centralized players and this for the better of humanity, which is the healthiest kind of progress.

Can you describe the underlying technology stack of Acurast and why it was chosen?

The Acurast protocol is a Proof of Stake chain which acts as a match-maker and orchestrator between users requesting compute, we call these “Consumers” and the users providing the compute infrastructure, we call these “Processors”. Also, the Acurast protocol is the layer that verifies the provided compute and only allows for payment if the SLA was met by the Processor.

The actual compute happens off-chain inside the Acurast Confidential Execution Environment provided by the Processors. This design was chosen to accommodate for scalability and trustless security of the system.

How does Acurast ensure the security and reliability of its physical infrastructure networks?

The consensus rules of the protocol enforce that only attested execution environments can onboard as computing units (aka Processors). These attestations directly leverage the secure element of the mobile phones to enable verifiable compute. Because it’s part of the protocol now we can allow for permissionless onboarding of compute units while having the certainty that these compute units cannot cheat. Furthermore, the provided execution environment allows for confidential computing, meaning that not even the operator with physical access to the devices is capable of extracting data or information about the execution.

Can you share some practical applications of Acurast that are currently in use or in development?

In Web3:
- bringing data on-chain in a verifiable way, aka Oracle, with a DeFi Platform (youves) securing 50M worth of assets.
- EVM compatible interval and on-demand oracles
- Automated Bitcoin multisig wallet for the institutional grade wrapped bitcoin called tzBTC, securing 40M worth of Bitcoins (https://tzbtc.io/tzbtc-2-0/)
- ZK proof generation offloading

In Web2:
- Research project with the University of Lugano and Zurich to leverage acurast TPU’s for decentralized AI training and inference
- Large scale web scraping and data aggregation
- distributed performance and monitoring platform
- TPU/GPU accelerated rendering
- Node JS backend hosting
- any AWS Lambda suitable tasks

Under development:
- Python runtime
- Distributed Hash Table
- Consortium based computing

How does Acurast integrate with existing physical infrastructure, or does it require building from the ground up?

Acurast leverages the most under-utilized and vastly available computing resource: the mobile phone. Instead of creating some custom hardware, Acurast converts the smartphone to a dedicated compute unit.

What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced in developing Acurast, and how have you addressed them?

As with every platform there is a chicken-egg challenge: for processors to onboard you require paying consumers, for paying consumers you require available processors. We solve this issue by an initial bootstrapping campaign allowing for processors to onboard and be subsidized by the protocol inflation for the start, this was wildly successful and allowed us to onboard already more than 1950 compute units growing rapidly day by day. Now that the processors are available we also start seeing a ramp-up in consumers.

Can you walk us through the key milestones Acurast has achieved so far, and how have these milestones directly impacted the growth and scalability of your network?

We’ve released the Acurast Processor Android application that supports over 500+ devices types for providing compute. At the back end of last year we launched Acurast Canary, our canary network that can already be used to onboard yourself as a Processor and providing compute with new or used mobile devices, even upcycled ones with e.g., broken screens. And on the other sides, developers are already able to deploy applications and also interact with web3 protocols.

How does Acurast handle scalability, especially as demand for decentralized services grows?

The Acurast protocol is a match-maker which includes also pricing in its equation. The price of the resources and the attractiveness to scale it further is all driven by a demand/supply balance. In simple terms this means that if demand grows more than the supply, the price is increasing making it more attractive to participate, which translates to more supply. Markets are beautiful tools.

How does Acurast plan to overcome societal or regulatory hurdles, especially in different jurisdictions?

Acurast is a global decentralized protocol, similar to Bitcoin or Ethereum it’s the participant’s responsibility to comply with their local regulations. Acurast will of course provide the tools wherever possible to help the participants to comply.

How does Acurast engage with its community, and what role does the community play in the project’s development?

There are various channels such as Discord, Telegram, X and our Ambassador program, which allows for the community to discuss their setup and promote new ideas to the core developers. Acurast is community-driven and much of the optimization that happened on the setup of larger scale processor farms actually was entirely a community effort. To iterated and incorporate feedback from the community is the only way how Acurast can succeed long-term.

What governance model does Acurast use, and how does it ensure fairness and transparency in decision-making?

Decentralisation is at the core of Acurast. Every protocol upgrade or treasury spent is entirely decided by the Acurast token holders in a transparent way.

How does Acurast address sustainability concerns, especially regarding energy consumption and environmental impact?

Sustainability is one of Acurast’s USPs. Not only are mobile devices way more energy efficient compared to any server out there, it also pushes actively for people to upcycle spare phones as compute units. And the great thing about this is that in economic terms it translates to lower operating costs due to the lower power consumption and lower capital expenses because there is a myriad of second hand devices out there that can be upcycled for their compute.

Where do you see Acurast and the DePIN industry in the next five years, and what are your long-term goals?

Acurast will have surpassed traditional cloud providers like GCP, AWS and Azure in terms of compute power.

Are there any upcoming features, developments or partnerships that you’re particularly excited about?

Our main net launch is planned for Q3 of this year and that’s where our efforts are currently focused on. This of course is super exciting because it amplifies the visibility of the project, for that we have a lot of exciting collaborations in our pipeline with partners in the DePIN space, web3 space but also from the web2 world!

And there is much more coming such as the support for iOS devices, drastically extended support for more coding languages for developers and their application.

What advice would you give to entrepreneurs or innovators looking to venture into decentralized infrastructure?

Just being “as good” or slightly better compared to centralized offerings won’t cut it. Adoption happens whenever you have something that is more than 10 times better.

I am convinced that given the scale of crowdsourced infrastructures this is definitely achievable with DePINs and that’s what newcomers should be obsessed with.

Last but not least, besides Acurast, what’s your favorite DePIN project?

This is easy: Bitcoin. Think about the disruption and movement this DePIN has already achieved on a global scale and watching it grow in importance year by year restores my hope in humanity. It’s the first and only tool humans have to hold governments and politicians accountable and it grew simply out of an idea nurtured by the crowd.

And anyone with a spare phone at home, maybe hidden in a drawer, or someone interested to provide compute in bulk by building a mini-farm — become a Processor, it’s just a QR-code scan away!