Acurast: Turning Smartphones Into a Decentralized Compute Network

From the AI models powering your apps to the backend systems running finance and healthcare, almost everything digital relies on compute power from a handful of massive data centres.

Those centres belong to just a few corporations – Amazon, Google, Microsoft – who control the world’s digital infrastructure.

Acurast is trying to change that. Instead of renting space in giant server farms, it wants to build a global network of compute power from the billions of smartphones that already exist.

How it works: Phones as compute nodes

Acurast is a platform that lets you contribute your phone’s unused processing power to a shared network. Developers can then tap into that network to run workloads.

The developer pays for the compute, and you receive part of that as a reward.

There are two ways you can use your phone to do this, via the ‘Lite’ app or the ‘Core’ alternative.

• ‘Lite’: You install an app that puts your phone to work when you aren’t using it, typically overnight, while it’s charging. This means you can still use your phone normally during the day.
• Core app (Android only): If you have a spare or second-hand phone, you can reset it and run Acurast full-time. In this mode, the phone essentially becomes a dedicated compute node.

Setting up the Lite app is extremely easy and takes less time than it would to set up a trading account or a wallet. The Core app is more involved and requires a factory reset, but still only takes a few minutes.

The decision over which one to use is a classic trade-off: you can receive more by making your phone a dedicated node, but then you can’t use it for anything else. So the Core app is only really for your second (or third, or fourth) phone.

According to Acurast, around 136,000 phones have already been onboarded via one of these two methods. Many of these are older or damaged devices, as this offers a great way to reuse phones that are superficially damaged but still have working processors. Others have been purchased second-hand, specifically for this purpose, as they’re easy to buy for very little online.

Why phones instead of servers?

The obvious question is: can phones really compete with data centers? Or even other compute projects like Render or Akash?

Acurast’s answer is that phones come with two big advantages over traditional infrastructure, as well as other decentralized projects: cost and security.

1. Cost and scale

Servers are expensive. A single rack can cost tens of thousands of dollars and guzzle power. By contrast, old smartphones are cheap and plentiful. Even buying a large number of second-hand phones is significantly cheaper than a server.

With billions of phones in circulation globally, the theory is that there’s a huge untapped supply of processing power sitting idle

Of course, a single phone can’t match a server. But if you combine hundreds of thousands of devices, the argument is that the network can scale to handle significant workloads, even if that sort of volume is a long way off at the moment.

2. Security and resilience

Modern smartphones are designed to protect sensitive information. iPhones have the Secure Enclave, Android devices have TrustZone. These are hardware “vaults” inside the chip, where things like your Face ID, PIN codes, and payment credentials live

Acurast can use these vaults to run jobs privately, in a way that even the phone’s owner can’t tamper with.

This also makes the network more resilient than data centres, because smartphones are heterogeneous: different models, chips, and operating systems make it nearly impossible to exploit them all in the same way. This is obviously very different to a data center which could, in theory, be hacked all at once.

The other advantage to phones is that they are being constantly tested, patched, and upgraded on a massive scale, so vulnerabilities are found and fixed very quickly.

What kind of jobs can it run?

This is still to be determined to some extent. Where Render focuses on GPU-heavy graphics jobs, and Helium on wireless coverage, Acurast is better suited to smaller, privacy-first compute tasks, though with more phones then more powerful jobs would be possible as well.

The idea is that a network of phones combined with the additional security can run relatively small-scale, contained jobs that might not be suitable for a large data centre.

One potential use case is for AI models where, for privacy or security reasons, a data centre is not a suitable place for the job. Imagine AI in a medical or financial setting, for example, where the institutions need AI assistance but can’t risk leaking proprietary data.

Right now there are clearly limitations, and it’s not realistic to expect Acurast to be able to offer enough compute for huge AI jobs, or graphical processing, at the moment

However, there has been a massive increase in the number of phones onboarded this year. If it can maintain that level of growth, then coping with much more compute-intensive jobs on the network becomes more likely.

Receiving rewards: cACU, ACU, and MIST

The fuel for the whole ecosystem is the transfer of money from developer to the people who provide compute. For offering up your phone, you can receive rewards.

Once the main network launches, these rewards will be paid in the ACU token. The case for owning the token is a classic one: since developers pay in ACU to use the network, more jobs equals more demand for the token, and upward price pressure.

There are some sources of secondary demand too, such as staking, since holders can delegate or restake their tokens for yield.

It’s worth mentioning that until that mainnet launch, rewards are paid in cACU, which can be converted into ACU later on. But in order to get the 1:1 conversion rate, your tokens are locked for 42 “cycles” of 28 days each, which works out at 3.7 years. To unlock them quicker you have to accept a lower conversion rate.

While your base ACU is locked, you can stake it immediately and receive staking rewards, those rewards are liquid and can be sold or used. In practice, this means your real liquidity comes from staking rewards, not the base tokens, for the first few years.

How much can you receive?

How much you can actually receive through Acurast depends on how much compute demand flows through the network and how you contribute

Using the Lite app on a daily phone will only provide small, passive rewards when idle, while dedicating a spare device with the Core app gives you more consistent payouts and staking opportunities

Based on other DePIN networks like Helium or Render, early adopters may benefit most, but the long-term results will depend entirely on whether developers actually choose Acurast for real workloads.

Cloud Rebellion & MIST

To encourage people to stick with the network, Acurast runs a loyalty program called Cloud Rebellion. It’s designed to reward users not just for plugging in their phones, but for being active members of the ecosystem.

Cloud Rebellion works to gamify contributing. By providing compute, joining campaigns, or completing tasks, you collect MIST, which are effectively loyalty points.

These MIST points dictate your share of tokens in the Cloud Rebellion Aidrop, which is distributing 10,000,000 ACU tokens to active members of the community.

Compute outside the clutches of Big Tech

Acurast is an ambitious attempt to rethink cloud computing. Instead of giant warehouses of servers, it wants to prove that the world’s billions of smartphones can form a secure, decentralized alternative.

For users, it’s a way to receive tokens from spare or broken devices, while for developers, it offers confidential compute without relying on Big Tech.

For token investors, it’s a bet that real demand for the type of smaller, privacy-focused jobs Acurast can help with will emerge.

It’s still very early in Acurast’s life cycle. The mainnet is due to launch in the final part of this year, and the roadmap for development extends well into next 2026.

That means that, of course, there are questions and potential hurdles to overcome. The theory of using smartphones for compute makes sense, but is it possible that phones can offer enough compute for Acurast to become an attractive place for developers to find the power they need?

Phones are limited in power, the ACU lock-up is long, and the market for these kinds of jobs isn’t yet proven. But at the same time, Acurast is one of the more creative experiments in the DePIN space

Whether it grows into a sustainable ecosystem depends less on technology, and more on whether developers see enough value in confidential, distributed jobs to choose phones over servers.

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