Acurast: Decentralized Serverless Cloud

TL;DR

Acurast tackles the problem of centralized trust in cloud infrastructure by introducing a decentralized serverless cloud with zero-trust, verifiable, and confidential compute. The approach combines a modular architecture (consensus, execution, application layers), a zero-trust execution layer (ATEE or ZK-based verifications), and a permissionless NPoS-style consensus with a liquid-matching orchestrator and reputation system. Key contributions include end-to-end deployment flow with hardware-enabled attestation, a flexible runtime ecosystem, and a tokenomic design featuring staked compute and multiple reward channels to incentivize honest participation. The work demonstrates broad applicability across market intelligence, AI, IoT, ZKPs, MPC, and blockchain infrastructure, with practical implications for privacy-preserving, decentralized cloud services and programmable data availability.

Abstract

Centralized trust is ubiquitous in today's interconnected world, from computational resources to data storage and its underlying infrastructure. The monopolization of cloud computing resembles a feudalistic system, causing a loss of privacy and data ownership. Cloud Computing and the Internet in general face widely recognized challenges, such as (1) the centralization of trust in auxiliary systems (e.g., centralized cloud providers), (2) the seamless and permissionless interoperability of fragmented ecosystems and (2) the effectiveness, verifiability, and confidentiality of the computation. Acurast is a decentralized serverless cloud that addresses all these shortcomings, following the call for a global-scale cloud founded on the principles of the open-source movement. In Acurast, a purpose-built orchestrator, a reputation engine, and an attestation service are enshrined in the consensus layer. Developers can off-load their computations and verify executions cryptographically. Furthermore, Acurast offers a modular execution layer, taking advantage of secure hardware and trusted execution environments, removing the trust required in third parties, and reducing them to cryptographic hardness assumptions. With this modular architecture, Acurast serves as a decentralized and serverless cloud, allowing confidential and verifiable compute backed by the hardware of security and performance mobile devices.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: End-to-End Zero Trust Deployment Execution
• Figure 2: States of a deployment.
• Figure 3: Acurast Architecture
• Figure 4: deployment Execution Scheduling Parameters
• Figure 5: Beta Probability Density Functions