Acurast Documentation
Decentralized Serverless Cloud
Motivation
Centralized trust is ubiquitous in today's interconnected world, from computational resources to data storage and its underlying infrastructure. Large-scale data leaks and breaches have shed light on these implicit trust assumptions and highlighted the need to evolve toward a permissionless and universally decentralized cloud future.
The widely recognized challenges of blockchains and the Internet, in general, are
- the centralization of trust in auxiliary systems (e.g., blockchain oracles)
- the seamless and permissionless interoperability of fragmented ecosystems, and
- the effectiveness and confidentiality of the execution layer.
Acurast is a Layer-1 blockchain that addresses these shortcomings with a novel confidential compute approach.
Acurast
Acurast provides a modular architecture ↗, separating the consensus, execution, and application layer.
The Acurast orchestrator is embedded in the consensus layer and contains a purpose-built reputation engine to assure reliability and incentivize honest behavior. The permissionless Acurast protocol enables a trustless onboarding of developers, empowering them to deploy applications; giving Processors the opportunity to be rewarded for their compute resources.
Acurast provides developers with a distributed, highly scalable arbitrary computation engine ready to be used for the most security sensitive tasks. Allowing projects and enterprises to securely interoperate regardless of the underlying technology.
Stakeholders
Consumers
Consumers want to offload computation in a confidential, verifiable, and efficient way. Consumers can declare their jobs in code, register them, and define parameters in detail (e.g., schedule, costs), subsequently matching them to appropriate processors through the Acurast Orchestrator.
Processors
Acurast Processors offer their computational capacity to Consumers. In return for the confidential execution and verifiable fulfillment of jobs, processors are rewarded by the Consumers. At this stage, processors utilize dedicated Android smartphones as the off-chain infrastructure behind the Acurast Secure Hardware Runtime (ASHR). Become a processor within minutes.
Orchestrator
The Acurast orchestrator (formerly known as Acurast Marketplace) is a centerpiece of the consensus layer, combining the orchestration (i.e., the scheduling of jobs and enabling the liquid matching) of the processor's compute resources and Consumers. The orchestrator plays an essential role in defining, agreeing, and enforcing value exchange between processors and consumers.
Supported Ecosystems & Integrations
As Acurast has interoperability at its core, it supports numerous ecosystems and multiple ways of extending support through integration in various environments such as EVM, WASM, Parachains and more.