Acurast offers a concrete decentralized compute solution by leveraging existing smartphone hardware, trusted execution environments (TEEs), and on-chain verification to reduce centralization in Web3 infrastructure.

The ACU token powers payments, staking, governance, and network security, with an initial supply of 1 billion ACU at the token generation event and plans to expand tooling, onboarding, and adoption across Web3, DePIN, and enterprise use cases.

Developers deploy workloads to the network; tasks are allocated to suitable devices and executed inside TEEs on phones, with cryptographic verification and on-chain settlement, while operators earn rewards and developers pay in ACU.

Smartphones are well-suited for this model due to their global distribution, low-latency potential, and underutilized idle compute, enabling broad, geographically distributed, resilient compute without additional infrastructure.

Timing matters: DePIN growth, rising AI compute needs, and regulatory/cost pressures on centralized clouds create favorable conditions for decentralized compute, with Acurast emphasizing lower latency, privacy, and cost advantages for AI workloads run near users.

Current progress includes onboarding over 166,700 smartphones, executing more than 322,000 deployments, and processing over 575 million on-chain transactions.

Acurast envisions a decentralized, serverless compute network that uses consumer smartphones to run code in trusted execution environments, turning idle phone compute into a global distributed cloud with on-device verification.

The core problem is centralization of compute in Web3 and related ecosystems, which creates single points of failure, privacy concerns, inefficiencies, and a drift from decentralization principles.