Meet The Visionary Turning Your Phone Into a Decentralized Cloud Server

Alessandro De Carli never set out to disrupt cloud computing. In fact, before Acurast, before decentralized networks, before blockchain, he wasn’t even thinking about money, at least, not in the way crypto forces you to think about it.

"I didn’t understand Bitcoin when I first heard about it," De Carli admits. "I didn’t understand money at all. It was just something you used, something that had value because people believed in it."

That belief, how value is created and who controls it, became central to De Carli’s journey. A Swiss-Italian with a technical background, he started his career in mobile security at Credit Suisse, working on securing banking apps, digital wallets, and authentication protocols. It was high-level security work, the kind of thing you don’t think about until it fails.

And then someone started pestering him about Bitcoin.

"A friend of mine wouldn’t stop talking about it. He kept telling me I needed to pay attention, that I needed to apply my knowledge in mobile security to Bitcoin," De Carli recalls. "At first, I ignored him. But the more we talked, the more I started questioning everything I thought I knew."

Bitcoin forced him to rethink money. Ethereum forced him to rethink trust. And decentralization—well, that changed everything.

"When Ethereum launched, I realized this wasn’t just about money anymore. It was about a completely new way of organizing systems. The ability to connect with anyone in the world, to raise funds, to build applications outside of any centralized authority—it was a fundamental shift. And I knew I wanted to be part of it."

That realization led him to co-found Papers, a company focused on self-custody solutions and mobile security for blockchain projects. The team worked with national banks, financial institutions, and some of the earliest crypto startups, long before ICOs became mainstream. But something wasn’t quite right.

"We were still relying on the same infrastructure that traditional finance was built on," De Carli says. "Even the decentralized projects were sourcing compute from centralized providers. It was missing the point."

That frustration led to Acurast.

"If decentralization is going to work, it has to start from the hardware up," he says. "And the most decentralized computing device in the world is the mobile phone."

Acurast isn’t just another blockchain project, it’s a full-scale reimagining of cloud computing. Instead of relying on massive, energy-hungry data centers, it turns mobile phones into a distributed compute network.

"People don’t realize how powerful their phones are. Every year, the best engineering minds at Apple, Google, and Samsung pour billions into optimizing mobile hardware. These devices are efficient, secure, and, most importantly, everywhere."

By using mobile devices instead of servers, Acurast removes the centralization risks inherent in traditional cloud services. It also unlocks an entirely new way to distribute compute power.

"We’re proving that you don’t need massive infrastructure to run complex computations. You just need enough devices working together. And with 50,000 mobile phones already on the network, it’s working."

But Acurast’s success isn’t just about computing power, it’s about access.

"Today, most of the world’s data centers are in North America, Europe, and China. Entire regions, Africa, parts of South America, large areas of Asia, are left out. If computing power is the foundation of AI, finance, and digital economies, then those regions are being systematically locked out of the future."

Acurast changes that.

"Anyone, anywhere can contribute their phone to the network. A small village in Africa could set up its own decentralized cloud cluster. A student in South America could monetize their old devices instead of throwing them away. It levels the playing field in a way that’s never been possible before."

And that brings De Carli back to the question of value.

"I started this journey not understanding why money had value. Now, I’m building a network where computing power itself becomes a currency, where anyone can contribute and get rewarded," he says. "That’s what decentralization is really about. Not just redistributing power, but making it available to everyone."

Next on Acurast’s roadmap is the launch of its mainnet token, ACU, scheduled for the next quarter. The network is already rewarding users with its canary token, cACU, but the transition to mainnet will mark a significant step in the project’s evolution.

"We’ve built the foundation. Now, we’re scaling it," De Carli says. "The token launch is just the beginning of an even bigger shift, one where cloud computing isn’t owned by a few corporations, but powered by the people."

For De Carli, Acurast isn’t just a business, it’s the logical endpoint of everything he’s learned since that first conversation about Bitcoin. It’s decentralization, but applied to something even bigger than money. It’s the redistribution of compute power on a planetary scale.

And if he’s right, the future of cloud computing won’t be in server farms. It’ll be in your pocket.