Acurast, a decentralized compute network that harnesses smartphones as secure processing nodes, has secured a total of $11 million in funding ahead of its upcoming token generation event and Mainnet launch on November 17. The capital has been raised through a mix of non dilutive grants and token based rounds completed between 2023 and 2025. The milestone comes less than a week before the network opens fully to users and developers looking for scalable, confidential, and verifiable compute.
Funding Milestones and Investor Base
The latest funding update follows an oversubscribed token sale on CoinList in May, which brought in $5.4 million from a broad base of supporters. This sale built on earlier grants and token rounds that helped Acurast develop its protocol and grow its community ahead of Mainnet. Together, these financings have positioned the project with both runway and strategic backing as it transitions from testnet to production.
Strategic Backers from the Web3 Ecosystem
Acurast’s contributor base includes a roster of high profile builders and early Web3 figures who see potential in decentralized compute built on everyday devices. Individual backers include Dr Gavin Wood, co founder of Ethereum and founder of Polkadot, Ogle, founder of GlueNet and a member of CoinDesk’s Most Influential list, Michael van de Poppe, founder of MN Capital, and Vineet Budki, chief executive of Sigma Capital. On the institutional side, Scytale Digital, HV Capital, Sigma Capital, and peaq are among the organizations supporting the project and its global expansion plans.
Turning Smartphones into a Compute Layer
At the core of Acurast’s vision is the idea that smartphones, which are widely distributed and heavily battle tested, can be repurposed as a decentralized compute layer. The network enables these devices to operate as verifiable nodes that execute workloads securely and confidentially, without reliance on centralized intermediaries. By doing so, Acurast aims to unlock idle processing power globally and turn it into a trustless infrastructure layer available to developers and enterprises.
Architecture and Vision for Open Compute
According to founder Alessandro De Carli, the upcoming token generation event marks the point at which Acurast becomes a fully open and globally accessible compute network. He argues that by transforming idle phones into confidential and verifiable compute resources, the project removes traditional gatekeepers from the cloud stack. This model is designed to make secure computation available to anyone, regardless of their access to conventional data center infrastructure.
Testnet Adoption and Network Scale
Before Mainnet launch, Acurast’s incentivized testnet has already been used to demonstrate that the model can scale and handle meaningful workloads. More than 149,000 phones have been onboarded to the network, with over 179,000 accounts created by participants exploring the protocol. On top of that, developers have executed upwards of 87,000 deployments, while the system has processed in excess of 492 million on chain transactions, signaling significant early traction.
Use Cases and Community Driven Growth
These devices are already being applied to workloads that demand both data confidentiality and computational integrity, such as decentralized automation flows and privacy preserving enterprise processes. Acurast’s community initiative, known as the Cloud Rebellion, has been created to reward users who help expand the network’s reach and resilience. Through this program, contributors are incentivized to bring more phones, more developers, and more applications onto the platform, strengthening the network effects around the protocol.
Road to Mainnet and Enterprise Applications
With Mainnet and the token generation event scheduled for November 17, Acurast is positioning itself as a foundation for both Web3 native and enterprise grade compute applications. The team highlights use cases that range from running AI workloads across a geographically distributed device network to powering verifiable automation and infrastructure resilience testing. The aim is to allow mission critical systems to run on a community owned infrastructure layer rather than in centralized data centers, while maintaining integrity and confidentiality guarantees.
As the countdown to launch enters its final days, Acurast is seeking to convert its early testnet momentum and investor backing into long term adoption. The combination of smartphone based infrastructure, strong Web3 credentials among backers, and an active community program gives the project a differentiated position in the decentralized compute space. Prospective users, developers, and contributors are now watching the upcoming Mainnet and token launch to see how the network performs once opened to a broader audience.