Acurast, a decentralized network utilizing everyday smartphones as secure compute nodes, has successfully launched a 225,000-node smartphone compute network on Base. This marks a significant milestone in bringing confidential onchain artificial intelligence (AI) into the mainstream Web3.
The integration with Base, an Ethereum Layer-2 chain designed to enhance decentralized applications’ speed, cost-effectiveness, and scalability, allows developers to run confidential AI workloads directly onchain using millions of smartphones worldwide.
Instead of depending on centralized infrastructure, this network utilizes Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) integrated into mobile devices to securely execute sensitive tasks, safeguarding user privacy and ensuring verifiability.
Smartphones: The New Cloud
Acurast aims to leverage the billions of smartphones already in use worldwide to establish a decentralized compute layer. Unlike traditional cloud providers with centralized servers posing risks of censorship and data exposure, Acurast’s model distributes workloads across devices in over 140 countries, all running confidential AI inference tasks within secure hardware enclaves.
Jesse Pollak, the Creator of Base, commented:
“Base provides developers with the ideal platform to bring innovative ideas to the blockchain. Acurast is expanding this platform by introducing decentralized, confidential compute powered by smartphones. This enables developers to run secure and verifiable AI workloads on Base without relying on centralized infrastructure. Such infrastructure facilitates the transition of autonomous real-world applications entirely onto the blockchain.”
The network has just gone live on Base’s mainnet post its token generation event, effectively handling production workloads securely.
Alessandro De Carli, the founder of Acurast, stated:
“AI agents cannot solely rely on centralized servers when tasked with managing real assets on the blockchain. By utilizing smartphone-based TEEs, we enable confidential AI that is verifiable, decentralized, and owned by the users powering it.”
Confidential AI and Native Payments
An integral aspect of this integration is the payment mechanism for compute.
Acurast now supports native $USDC payments on Base’s network without requiring bridging or offchain settlement layers. By adopting the x402 payment standard (originally developed for instant, HTTP-native stablecoin payments), AI agents can autonomously pay for compute resources in real time.
This opens avenues for a pay-per-request model in decentralized services, enabling AI agents to automatically settle fees in $USDC while processing tasks. This is a significant step for autonomous Web3 applications interacting with APIs, data services, and intricate onchain logic sans intermediaries.
A New Layer for Onchain AI Workloads
Developers utilizing Acurast on Base can onboard devices and manage compute infrastructure through the Acurast Hub using a Base wallet.
Within the Hub, builders can deploy secure, autonomous AI agents like bots executing trades, managing assets, or performing on-chain reconciliations. All this occurs while keeping inputs and outputs encrypted and hidden from node operators.
All AI inference runs within smartphone TEEs, ensuring neither the device owner nor external observers can access confidential data during processing—critical for privacy-centric applications in finance, identity, and enterprise workflows.
Beyond Data Centers
This development follows Acurast’s robust growth, with the decentralized compute network rapidly expanding throughout 2025, transitioning from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of phones powering Web3 workloads.
Acurast is driving the progress of large-scale confidential computing, combining decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN), onchain AI, and real-time machine-native payments.
With its native token now traded on major exchanges and the global network executing live production tasks, Acurast is laying the groundwork for a new breed of onchain applications inherently decentralized, verifiable, confidential, and autonomous.
The article “Acurast turns 225,000 smartphones into a secure AI network on Base” was originally published on BeInCrypto.