Performance Analysis of Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks and Centralized Clouds
Jan von der Assen, Christian Killer, Alessandro De Carli, Burkhard Stiller
TL;DR
This paper investigates Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) as an alternative to centralized clouds, introducing Acurast as a decentralized serverless cloud that leverages IoT devices and crypto-economic design to enable end-to-end secure computations. It presents a modular architecture with a reputation-driven orchestrator and secure hardware runtimes, and it validates the approach through node discovery, performance benchmarking against CSPs, and power-efficiency measurements. The results indicate that Acurast can achieve competitive compute performance and substantially improved power efficiency, suggesting meaningful potential for DePIN-based infrastructures in serverless workloads, while also highlighting limitations and avenues for further validation and security assessments.
Abstract
The advent of Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN) represents a shift in the digital infrastructure of today's Internet. While Centralized Service Providers (CSP) monopolize cloud computing, DePINs aim to enhance data sovereignty and confidentiality and increase resilience against a single point of failure. Due to the novelty of the emerging field of DePIN, this work focuses on the potential of DePINs to disrupt traditional centralized architectures by taking advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices and crypto-economic design in combination with blockchains. This combination yields Acurast, a more distributed, resilient, and user-centric physical infrastructure deployment. Through comparative analysis with centralized systems, particularly in serverless computing contexts, this work seeks to lay the first steps in scientifically evaluating DePINs and quantitatively comparing them in terms of efficiency and effectiveness in real-world applications. The findings suggest DePINs' potential to (i) reduce trust assumptions and physically decentralized infrastructure, (ii) increase efficiency and performance simultaneously while improving the computation's (iii) confidentiality and verifiability.