I rarely turn on the old phones sitting in my drawer anymore. Scratched screens, swollen batteries, sluggish systems—they were pushed aside long ago by newer devices. Only recently did it occur to me that they might not have to keep gathering dust.
@Acurast has a straightforward idea: turn the smartphones already out there around the world into a verifiable computing network. Developers don’t have to buy servers or set up infrastructure themselves first. They submit a task, and the network matches it to devices based on their CPU, memory, and storage capabilities. Phones already have a hardware-isolated trusted execution environment where tasks can run, so sensitive inference or automation scripts don’t have to expose all their data.
For developers, the barrier to entry is much lower: they can access distributed computing power without building their own data centers. For ordinary people, an old phone plugged in and connected to the internet can contribute some processing power while it sits idle, earning the corresponding amount of $ACU. It’s not simply a matter of “contribute a device, get a reward”—developers pay to use the computing power, and those fees are burned. The more genuine the demand, the more visible the consumption. The network is already fairly substantial, with hundreds of thousands of devices across more than a hundred countries and cumulative transaction volume in the billions. The mainnet has also been running for some time.
Of course, having lots of devices connected doesn’t mean people are actually paying to use them on an ongoing basis. Impressive transaction counts are one thing; what matters is how many tasks run reliably, how much computing power is genuinely being used, and whether developers are willing to pay repeatedly. The initial supply of $ACU is one billion tokens, with additional tokens released through annual inflation. Whether burns can keep up ultimately depends on real demand. An idle phone isn’t a guaranteed source of passive income: its specs, uptime, and network reliability all affect earnings. Using an old phone that doesn’t store your assets is less of a hassle than running it on your everyday device.
What makes this interesting isn’t that it’s yet another token project, but that it reorganizes hardware that already exists to help fill the computing gap for AI and automation tasks. Phones don’t have to be just consumer devices, and developers gain an option that doesn’t require building their own data centers. If supply and demand can find each other, those old phones in the drawer don’t have to be seen as nothing but e-waste.
@Acurast has a straightforward idea: turn the smartphones already out there around the world into a verifiable computing network. Developers don’t have to buy servers or set up infrastructure themselves first. They submit a task, and the network matches it to devices based on their CPU, memory, and storage capabilities. Phones already have a hardware-isolated trusted execution environment where tasks can run, so sensitive inference or automation scripts don’t have to expose all their data.
For developers, the barrier to entry is much lower: they can access distributed computing power without building their own data centers. For ordinary people, an old phone plugged in and connected to the internet can contribute some processing power while it sits idle, earning the corresponding amount of $ACU. It’s not simply a matter of “contribute a device, get a reward”—developers pay to use the computing power, and those fees are burned. The more genuine the demand, the more visible the consumption. The network is already fairly substantial, with hundreds of thousands of devices across more than a hundred countries and cumulative transaction volume in the billions. The mainnet has also been running for some time.
Of course, having lots of devices connected doesn’t mean people are actually paying to use them on an ongoing basis. Impressive transaction counts are one thing; what matters is how many tasks run reliably, how much computing power is genuinely being used, and whether developers are willing to pay repeatedly. The initial supply of $ACU is one billion tokens, with additional tokens released through annual inflation. Whether burns can keep up ultimately depends on real demand. An idle phone isn’t a guaranteed source of passive income: its specs, uptime, and network reliability all affect earnings. Using an old phone that doesn’t store your assets is less of a hassle than running it on your everyday device.
What makes this interesting isn’t that it’s yet another token project, but that it reorganizes hardware that already exists to help fill the computing gap for AI and automation tasks. Phones don’t have to be just consumer devices, and developers gain an option that doesn’t require building their own data centers. If supply and demand can find each other, those old phones in the drawer don’t have to be seen as nothing but e-waste.