Continued: The Road To Acurast Mainnet

A message from Co-Founder Alessandro De Carli, Acurast Association:

7 min readJun 26, 2024

Dear Rebels, at the end of last year, we shared a high-level roadmap for Acurast. Acurast has come a long way since then, with many exciting things happening. We felt now is the best time to share an update on the roadmap, and some additional insights.

Acurast’s core is about openness and transparency. The impact of open-source has been a revolution for software, Acurast builds on this same ethos and brings those values and beliefs to compute. This is ultimately what Web3 is all about: a better internet owned and operated by users for users.

The last couple of months have been very intense with events all over the globe, conversations with amazing community members, many technical advancements, releases, the launch of a very successful “Cloud Rebellion” program, and a myriad of amazing new partnerships. All of this translated to a massive boost in traction of the adoption of the protocol with a huge number of new onboarded Processors — you Rebels are awesome!

As we are nearing the launch of the Acurast Mainnet, there are a couple of important updates on the roadmap we’d like to share, but first, let us highlight some of the great achievements and milestones:

Expansion of supported Android phones — 2024Q1

Security is at the very foundation of what we do. Without the verifiability of compute provided by the Processors, the entire security assumptions are reduced to trust. Trust-based security does not scale in an adversarial landscape like the internet. While the Acurast protocol allows for all sorts of proofs for the verifiability (ZK, Consensus based, MPC, etc.), the current default is built on top of security hardware. For this reason, when the Acurast Canary launched last year, we focused on supporting the most secure hardware security modules out there, which are currently only present in the Google Pixel and high-end Samsung phones.

This led to the drying up of many of the secondary and trade-in markets for these phones, partially or completely. Moreover, some parts of the world were excluded from participating because these phones were unavailable. We realized that this needed to change to achieve our scaling goals, and we had to expand the list of supported phones and include phones with weaker security modules.

Though these phones still offer a very high level of security, it’s not the highest. However, this translates to a huge variety of phones and a substantial secondary market. Nowadays, people can onboard a diverse range of Android phones.

And what about developers who want to work only with the most secure compute units?

Well, they can because every security hardware attestation highlights the kind of hardware used, and developers can simply filter and select what suits their needs.

Opening the population of supported phones allowed us to grow the offered compute from a couple of hundred compute units to thousands.

NodeJS — 2024 — Q2

The initial version of the verifiable Acurast runtime was a hardened V8 Javascript engine. This engine allowed us to onboard many high-security use cases, such as the self-custody wrapped Bitcoin project tzBTC and other web3 high-security automations, securing more than 100M USD in assets. We saw an influx of requests for a more versatile and widely used runtime.

To satisfy this need, the Acurast engineers included a hardened version of the NodeJS runtime. NodeJS is the most widely adopted runtime by developers [1,2]. The scale becomes clearer when looking at the over 1.5 billion downloads. In comparison, estimates state there are 27k active web3 developers [3].

The rationale behind this release was to scale the demand side of Acurast by offering a serverless infrastructure that would appeal to the larger population of developers, and it succeeded. The number of deployments after the launch and interest by the developer community picked up substantially and is also growing fast.

Supporting NodeJS as an additional environment in Acurast’s Cloud marks a significant advancement, broadening our application horizon. With the introduction of NodeJS support, Acurast can better serve the Web2 developer market, accommodating use cases such as Backends as a Service, on-chain automation [4]), market intelligence (web scraping), Telegram bots (link), and interactive web3 backends.

Cloud Rebellion — 2024 — Q2

Acurast is not about bringing “just another serverless cloud offering” to the community but about instantiating the open-source ethos to compute.

Today, the broad adoption of cloud computing has resulted in an Internet landscape that is strikingly similar to feudalism. The dominance of a few monopolistic players created a scenario where trust in cloud operators is a requirement, not just an option. Technology critics even argued that the “Lords of the Cloud” are wreaking havoc on the world economy, causing loss of privacy, data ownership, and ease of mass surveillance. The only way forward is not to simply distribute the Internet’s architecture, but to decentralize it at large.

With this mission at heart, we launched the “Cloud Rebellion” to engage with our like-minded community and provide a system for tracking their impact by earning MIST ☁️ (points). Activities include completing quests, onboarding processors, providing compute, using referral links to invite friends, and much more.

This platform has been a huge success and catalyst for Acurast’s traction; it fills us with joy and motivation to see how the community is supporting each other and is posting highly valuable content on social media like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwd7v5jPD-A.

If you are reading about this for the first time and have not joined the rebellion yet, we highly encourage you to do so today and support a growing community of 1000s of people who believe the future of compute should be open and by users for users: https://rebellion.acurast.com/

And now, going forward, what are the updates on the roadmap?

The biggest update on the roadmap shared last year is that we realized one key requirement for this hyperscale pre-mainnet launch phase is the speed of deploying protocol updates. Today, we have regular updates on Acurast Canary on a weekly basis. These updates include optimizations, iterations over findings that came up during active use of the protocol, or even totally new features.

Because of this key requirement, we pushed back the removal of sudo and the entire governance functionality to shortly before the mainnet launch.

To put things into perspective: the canary net already successfully processed more than 16M on-chain transactions since its genesis with a growth rate of 300k daily transactions, basically battle testing all aspects of the protocol and proving scalability of the reference node. This battle testing obviously leads to many improvements and optimizations for every component, including the protocol.

Our mission going forward is simple: scale. We want to scale demand, scale supply, and scale the community. There are various upcoming big releases that we’d like to anticipate in this roadmap update:

Acurast Developer CLI — 2024Q2

Until now, Acurast Developers had to utilize the Acurast Console to deploy their applications. While this worked fairly well, it was a highly manual process. In nature, developers dislike manual processes (and we know first-hand, team members have been telling us that).

To boost the growth of deployments and adoption of the serverless compute provided by thousands of phones world-wide, we’re proud to be launching a game-changer: the Acurast Developer CLI. This open-source CLI allows developers to deploy their NodeJS application with ease by utilizing just their command line, directly out of their project. We’re excited to share soon more details and a series of webinars and How-To’s targeting developers.

Stay tuned as the launch is imminent.

Acurast Processor Lite — 2024 Q3

At Acurast, we embrace the idea of tapping into unused compute by upcycling old or dedicated phones, that would have otherwise been forgotten in drawers. These phones sport some of the most advanced silicon known to mankind and shouldn’t be just wasted. Breathing a second life in these phones is good for the protocol but also good for the environment and a sustainable future.

However, not everyone has a spare phone lying around, but everyone does have a mobile phone. We want everyone to be able to contribute to Acurast and the Acurast Processor Lite is the answer to that. Our amazing engineering team has bent over backwards to deliver a version of the Acurast Processor that can be run on your everyday phone, while you are not using the phone (i.e. at night while charging). As security and user privacy is of outmost importance to us and a core value, the development of this included also solving the big challenge of having a complete isolation of Acurast from your personal data.

This breakthrough innovation will not only lower the entry barrier for Rebels to join, but will be a major driver of activating that huge pool of underutilized compute for a better internet.

More updates on this will follow in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

Acurast Mainnet and more

And here we are… The big moment everyone is waiting for. After more than 3 years of building, a live canary net with tons of activity, impressively growing compute and the best community out there, the Acurast Mainnet launch is nearing fast and we have specified a timeframe.

The Acurast Mainnet and TGE are set to occur in Q4 of this year. More details on this pivotal moment and the way forward after the launch will be shared in the coming months.

Stay tuned for more details on each initiative; we will share more in the coming weeks. There is a ton of more ground breaking announcements I was not allowed to share yet, but I’m burning to do so!