Transforming the Cloud Landscape: Mobile-Powered Disruption for Decentralized, Permissionless, and Trustless Compute
About the Project
Acurast is a Layer-1 blockchain designed to address the pervasive centralization of trust in today's interconnected world, particularly in computational resources and data storage. With the rise of large-scale data breaches, the need for a zero-trust future has become evident. Acurast introduces a decentralized and serverless approach to mitigate these challenges, embedding a purpose-built orchestrator and a reputation engine within the consensus layer. This setup allows consumers to offload their computations and verify executions cryptographically, ensuring a higher degree of trust and security.
The modular architecture of Acurast offers a unique execution layer that leverages secure hardware coprocessors. This design eliminates the need for trust in third parties, reducing dependencies to cryptographic hardness assumptions. By providing seamless and native settlements across different ecosystems, Acurast enhances the effectiveness and confidentiality of computations. This modular approach not only increases computational efficiency but also supports a wide range of applications, making Acurast a versatile and robust decentralized cloud solution.
Acurast's vision extends beyond just building a network; it aims to fundamentally shift mainstream expectations of internet privacy and security. The platform's commitment to trustless, scalable, and confidential computations addresses the inherent challenges of blockchains, such as the centralization of trust in auxiliary systems, interoperability of fragmented ecosystems, and the effectiveness and confidentiality of the execution layer. Through its innovative approach, Acurast strives to set a new standard for decentralized applications and data security.
Use Case
Acurast's innovative Zero Trust architecture opens up a multitude of use cases across various domains by addressing critical challenges in the current Internet landscape. Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) applications benefit significantly from Acurast’s capabilities, enabling secure and privacy-preserving operations such as anonymous voting systems, digital asset exchanges, and secure biometric authentication. By leveraging Acurast's infrastructure, developers can offload intensive ZKP computations in a zero trust manner, ensuring that processes like privacy-preserving mixing of transactions or data remain confidential and tamper-proof. This functionality extends beyond Web3 transactions, encompassing sensitive data such as internet traffic metadata and file information, enhancing privacy and security in a range of applications.
Another key area of application for Acurast is Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC), which allows multiple parties to perform joint computations without disclosing their private inputs. This is particularly useful in scenarios like collaborative financial investments or medical data analysis where privacy and confidentiality are paramount. Acurast’s decentralized and serverless backend also addresses the need for robust blockchain infrastructure by serving as a reliable, incorruptible sequencer that mitigates risks associated with Blockchain Extractable Value (BEV) and Miner Extractable Value (MEV). Furthermore, Acurast supports advanced blockchain infrastructure features such as serverless applications, native cross-chain DeFi, and decentralized scraping infrastructure, facilitating secure data transactions, automated actions, and privacy-preserving AI operations. These use cases collectively showcase Acurast’s potential to revolutionize privacy and trust in digital ecosystems.
Tokenomics
The Acurast ecosystem manages a total supply of 1 billion ACU and cACU (Canary Acurast Tokens), which is subject to adjustments based on inflation and burn rates. Token distribution and the Token Generation Events (TGE) are detailed in associated documentation. Within this decentralized NPoS (Nominated Proof of Stake) network, participants are required to stake and nominate tokens to ensure the protocol's security and finality. Stakers are incentivized through rewards derived from transaction fees and protocol inflation. It's important to note that ACU and cACU tokens do not represent any equity stake or ownership rights in the Acurast Association or the project itself, nor do they confer rights to future profit shares or intellectual property.
The vesting mechanics for staked tokens are designed to encourage long-term commitment. A vote-escrow model is employed, where stakers lock their tokens for up to 5 years, with longer lock-up periods offering greater weight and incentives. This system also creates a "bailout" pool to cover potential protocol failures. Participants entering the vesting pool receive a weight proportional to their stake and the duration of their lock-up period. They can choose to extend their staking period or increase their stake to enhance their weight. Exiting the pool involves a cooldown period during which the participant’s weight is halved, but they can regain full weight by re-staking and committing to a new cooldown period. Failure to exit within the specified time may result in rewards being forfeited, which can be claimed by other participants through the Kickout function.