Interview: Bitvavo x Acurast

Following the listing of ACU on Bitvavo, we sat down with Alessandro De Carli, CEO & Co-founder of Acurast, to discuss the project's foundations, the problems it's solving, and the vision driving its future.

 What is your background and what led to you building Acurast? 

I was working in mobile security at CreditSuisse before moving into tech and later pivoting towards blockchain. I saw the huge potential there was to disrupt the Web3 space using the existing security features of mobile hardware.

In one or two sentences: what does your project do, and what problem are you solving? 

Acurast is building a decentralized cloud, leveraging everyday phones to provide secure, trustless and affordable cloud computing. We’re eliminating the need for big datacentres, and putting the power back to the people. 

What makes Acurast meaningfully different from other projects in Decentralized Compute? 

While many compute projects aggregate spare GPU/CPU capacity, Acurast does something fundamentally different: we leverage hardware that everyone has in their pockets, the smartphone, to create our own verifiable global compute network. 

Using the built-in security hardware from smartphones, called Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), we can guarantee confidentiality and cryptographic proof of execution by default. And with already 257K+ smartphones onboarded across 175+ countries, it’s a scale and trust model that’s hard to replicate. 

Can you share a concrete example of how Acurast is being used in real life? 

While Acurast provides compute that can generally be used for any use case, the biggest traction we currently see is in AI data collection, where AI agents require compute to access internet resources. 

Using Acurast, AI agents get secure access to scrape real-world data like news, stock prices, or marketing intelligence data, directly from the web. And because of the built-in security mentioned earlier, these AI agents can be certain the data hasn’t been tampered with, removing the need for a centralized middleman. 

What are the most important milestones you’ve achieved so far? 

Our biggest milestone was launching on Mainnet alongside the Token Generation Event in January, marking the transition from concept to being a fully live, decentralized network. Since then, we’ve been working on executing our roadmap milestones, with our most recent achievement being Codename: Cargo. Just launched on our Canary network for testing, Cargo is a huge breakthrough in usability and developer experience. It essentially brings a decentralized Virtual Private Server (VPS) experience powered by smartphones, removing code language barriers, and opening up a wide array of new use cases for Acurast. 

What role does the ACU token play within the ecosystem? 

The ACU token is the fuel of the network. Without it, you can’t run it. Developers consume ACU to deploy their applications, providers earn ACU for their compute. 

ACU also powers decentralized governance: the higher your ACU balance, the more say you have in the future of the network. And through our staking mechanism, anyone can secure the network by delegating their tokens to compute providers, getting a share of their rewards without needing any hardware.

So in short: All activities on the Acurast network are either secured by ACU or consume ACU to run a truly decentralized confidential compute network.

Given the importance of secure and reliable computing, how does Acurast approach security, reliability, and user trust, especially when leveraging mobile hardware? 

Security is the foundation for what we do at Acurast. In a decentralized network two things need to be guaranteed: that the compute being provided is genuine, and that the person providing it can’t see the data or manipulate it.

That is why the hardware part is so important. I mentioned the TEE before, and it’s essentially a secure, isolated built-in chip in modern smartphones. Every workload from Acurast runs through it, and it ensures the execution can’t be tampered or inspected, not even by the phone owner. Outputs are then signed using the phones built-in Hardware Secuity Module (HSM), ensuring verifiable cryptographic proof that results were not manipulated. Basically, the hardware ensures the trust, so you don’t have to. 

What are your key priorities for the next 6–12 months? 

We’re currently building further on improving the developer experience, expanding our use cases and enabling more high performance compute tasks. One of our next big milestones is Codename: Bazaar, which will allow developers to create ready-to-use containers they can distribute, and monetize directly on Acurast. A huge step forward in the maturity and scale of the project.

How do you see the decentralized compute sector evolving over the next few years? 

As AI is developing at a very fast pace, and becoming more agentic, it needs more and more compute power, and therefore the demand is going to surge. Moreover, with the geopolitical shifts, individuals and companies are demanding greater transparency over how their data is handled, making privacy and confidential compute not a nice to have, but a necessity.  

Why did you choose to get listed on Bitvavo, and what does this listing mean for your community? 

We chose Bitvavo as it’s one of Europe's most trusted and regulated exchanges, giving our community a reliable and accessible entry point into ACU. With this listing, we’re able to broaden our reach in the European market and make it easier for everyone to participate and support the network. 

What led to the creation of your project? Was there a specific moment, insight, or problem that made you decide to build this? 

We were always very interested in the concept of a crowdsourced compute platform and followed many of the decentralized compute networks out there. But we kept seeing the same two challenges these projects were facing: : 

First, security: how do you make sure the hardware is real and people can’t cheat?

Second, economics: competing with hyperscalers on server hardware is a losing battle, as decentralization adds overhead by definition.  

Smartphones solved both of these challenges: the TEE handles security by design, and since these phones are already out there and available, we don’t have to invest in the hardware ourselves. That was the insight that led to Acurast. 

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute a marketing communication or recommendation. None of the content herein should be considered as investment advice or a substitute for it. Bitvavo makes no guarantees regarding the accuracy or completeness of the provided information. Investments involve risks. There is a possibility of losing your entire invested capital.