Turning Old Phones Into Decentralized Cloud Powerhouses

Most people think of cloud computing as massive warehouses full of servers owned by just a handful of tech giants.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s been that way for decades. But things are starting to change. A few innovative projects are working to make cloud computing more decentralized. We’ve got platforms like Iagon, which runs on the Cardano blockchain, a project I’ve talked about in previous articles and videos.
 

There are also others such as Storj, Filecoin, and Arweave pushing toward the same goal. Today, though, we’re diving into another project I’ve recently discovered. What makes this one stand out is that it lets you turn your old smartphones into dedicated machines that help secure a new and growing cloud storage infrastructure. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the beginning.
 

The project we are talking about today is called Acurast. Instead of relying on centralized data centers, Acurast taps into the idle processing power of phones around the world and rewards you in crypto for contributing your device to the network. The big idea is simple but powerful. Use hardware people already own, secure it with modern phone security features, and create a more open, private, and censorship‑resistant alternative to traditional cloud providers.​

What Acurast Actually Is​

Acurast describes itself as a real decentralized compute network that lets developers run secure workloads on a global fleet of smartphones instead of centralized servers.
Under the hood, it uses the trusted execution environments built into modern phones, like Secure Enclave or TrustZone, so computations run in a hardware‑isolated area that even the phone owner cannot easily tamper with or inspect. This gives Acurast a unique angle in the DePIN space because it is not just renting out generic CPU cycles, it is offering confidential and verifiable compute that can be used for sensitive tasks, such as AI inference on private data or security‑critical operations for DeFi and Web3 apps. On top of that, the network already claims hundreds of millions of testnet transactions and says it helps secure hundreds of millions of dollars in assets across multiple chains, which shows it is more than just a whitepaper concept.​

How You Earn Crypto With Your Phone​

From a user perspective, Acurast is all about installing an app and letting your phone quietly contribute to the network while you earn rewards.

There are two main ways to participate. A lighter mode aimed at your main phone and a more committed mode for spare or dedicated devices.

The lighter approach is designed so you can keep using your phone normally, with the app primarily running jobs when the device is idle or charging, which is more friendly for casual users who just want to dip their toes in. The core mode asks more from you, usually involving a factory reset and dedicating the device as a full‑time processor for the network, and in return it aims to provide steadier and potentially higher rewards. Right now, a lot of the earning is happening through an incentivized phase that uses cACU, a claim on future ACU tokens, and community reports often talk about stacking these testnet rewards while waiting for full mainnet economics to play out.​

The ACU, cACU, And MIST Economy​

The Acurast ecosystem revolves around its main token ACU, which lives on the project’s own Substrate‑based Polkadot parachain and serves as the currency for paying for compute, interacting with the chain, and rewarding participants. Developers spend ACU to run jobs on the network, and those fees flow back to processors, delegators, and other contributors through various reward mechanisms, including staking and benchmarking incentives. Before mainnet fully kicked in, Acurast introduced cACU as an incentivized testnet reward token that can later be converted into ACU under specific conditions, and that is where things get more complex and long‑term focused.

The standard path is a one‑to‑one conversion of cACU to ACU with a long lockup of multiple years, and while these locked tokens cannot be freely traded, they can still be staked to earn liquid rewards that users can actually claim and use. To make participation more engaging, the team also built a loyalty layer called Cloud Rebellion, where users earn MIST points for providing compute, completing quests, and engaging with the ecosystem, and those points control access to a large ACU airdrop pool reserved for active community members.​

Built On Polkadot, Aiming For Multi‑Chain​

On the infrastructure side, Acurast is not a smart contract on someone else’s chain. It runs its own chain in the Polkadot ecosystem, giving it a dedicated execution environment and shared security through Polkadot’s relay chain. The ACU token is the native asset on this mainnet, and the project also tested its architecture through a canary deployment connected to Kusama before moving into full mainnet operations. Choosing Polkadot fits the project’s ambition to interact with many different ecosystems because Polkadot’s design makes it easier to build cross‑chain bridges and secure interoperability, which matters when your compute network is already touching assets and use cases across chains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tezos, and others. For developers, this means Acurast can position itself as a confidential compute layer that any chain can tap into, rather than being siloed into a single ecosystem, and that story lines up well with a multi‑chain, modular future.​

Real Use Cases And Who This Is For​

Acurast is clearly leaning into the confidential compute angle, which means it is not trying to replace GPU render farms or heavy training workloads right away but instead focusing on smaller, privacy‑sensitive jobs. Examples include AI inference on personal or regulated data, cryptographic tasks such as secure key operations or threshold signing for DeFi protocols, and cross‑chain infrastructure that needs both verifiability and secrecy.

The ability to run logic inside a phone’s secure enclave gives developers a way to offload sensitive computations off‑chain while still having strong guarantees that the code ran correctly and the input data was not exposed to node operators or centralized providers. This makes Acurast particularly interesting for teams building in finance, healthcare, identity, and other sectors where mixing Web3 and strict privacy requirements is usually painful.​

The Good — What Acurast Gets Right​

One of the clearest strengths of Acurast is how accessible it makes DePIN participation, because you do not need specialized hardware to join; you just need a smartphone that you are willing to let work a bit harder. This alone dramatically lowers the barrier to entry compared to GPU projects or custom hotspot miners and helps the network grow geographically and socially far beyond traditional crypto‑native audiences. At the same time, the project leans into sustainability by repurposing older or even cosmetically damaged phones that still have working internals, cutting down on e‑waste and squeezing more useful life out of devices that might otherwise live in a drawer.

From a decentralization perspective, tens of thousands of distributed phones across many countries are far harder to censor or shut down than a few centralized data centers, and the use of TEEs gives the network a genuine security story instead of just raw node count. The fact that Acurast is already being used to secure significant value across multiple blockchains, with hundreds of millions of testnet transactions behind it, suggests real‑world testing instead of pure theory, which is always a positive sign.​

The Bad And The Trade‑Offs You Need To Know​

For all its strengths, Acurast is still an experiment, and there are very real trade‑offs that anyone running phone farms or stacking cACU should think about carefully. First, the tokenomics are intentionally long‑term, with multi‑year lockups for one‑to‑one cACU to ACU conversion, which is a big commitment if you are used to fast liquidity and quick flips, even if staking rewards offer some early liquidity on top. If demand for compute does not grow as fast as emissions or hype, the market value of those future tokens could end up disappointing people who approached the project as a simple passive‑income play rather than a long‑term infrastructure bet.

Second, the hardware environment is messy by design. Phones have different CPUs, memory, thermal behavior, and network conditions, and sustained workloads can lead to instability, throttling, or battery stress if the system is not tuned properly. There is also genuine UX friction when you move beyond a single daily driver into multiple dedicated devices, because wiping phones, configuring them, and monitoring them is not something every casual user wants to do.

Finally, the bigger open questions are on the demand and regulatory side, because the long‑term sustainability of rewards depends on real developers choosing to pay for this kind of confidential compute, and regulators may eventually have opinions about sensitive or potentially illegal workloads being processed across user‑owned devices around the world, even if the data is encrypted and hardware‑isolated.​

How To Think About Acurast Going Forward​

Acurast sits at the intersection of several narratives you are probably already tracking: decentralization of infrastructure, the rise of DePIN, privacy‑preserving AI, and a broader backlash against the concentration of compute power in the hands of a few mega‑corps.
The project’s design clearly targets people who are willing to think in years, not weeks, and who are excited about helping build a new kind of cloud that is owned by its users and contributors instead of a small group of shareholders. If you approach it as a long‑term experiment with hardware you can afford to dedicate and capital you can afford to leave locked while the ecosystem matures, it becomes a very interesting way to participate in the evolution of decentralized compute. If you go in expecting guaranteed returns or instant liquidity, the lockups, technical complexity, and uncertainty around demand make it far riskier than it might look at a glance.

Final Thoughts

The healthiest mindset is to see Acurast as a live laboratory for phone‑based confidential compute, where the upside is learning how this new infrastructure layer works while optionally earning on the side, rather than treating it as a replacement for a paycheck.​
Thanks for reading everyone! Let me know in the comments what you think about the future of cloud compute. Do you think over time companies like Acurast and Iagon can give the big names like AWS a run for their money?

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Original article on Medium