299: Beating the Data Centers — Confidential, Verifiable Compute with Acurast

Web3 with Sam Kamani

Today’s “cloud” is concentrated in a handful of mega data centers. Acurast is flipping that model by turning smartphones into a confidential, verifiable compute network—made for Web3 and AI. Founder Dr. Christian Killer explains how they verify hardware, encrypt workloads end-to-end, and deliver trust-minimized compute for price feeds, bridging, LLM inference, web scraping, residential proxy/VPN, and even distributed agent indexing (MIT NANDA).

Timestamps

• [00:00] Intro & the problem: compute is centralized in ~5 companies

• [00:02] Christian’s path (gaming → Bitcoin Lightning NFC → Web3 infra)

• [00:04] Why decentralize compute? Cost, control, and data misuse risk

• [00:05] Phones vs servers: performance-per-watt, economics, upcycling

• [00:07] The hard bit: verifying hardware + trusted execution environments

• [00:08] How Acurast works (supply/demand, encrypted jobs, scheduling)

• [00:09] Web3 demand: price feeds & bridging done trust-minimized

• [00:10] Web2 demand: scraping + residential IP/VPN for AI startups

• [00:11] AI focus: inference today, confidential LLMs, agent guardrails

• [00:13] “Agentic AI” hype vs practice—what actually matters

• [00:16] Distributed agent indexing (MIT NANDA) explained simply

• [00:18] What most people miss about LLMs (probabilistic behavior)

• [00:20] Quantum computing: progress, hype, and reality

• [00:21] Biggest technical challenges ahead (clustering, MPC, DKG)

• [00:24] Moore’s Law → performance per watt (phones keep winning)

• [00:25] DePIN’s real challenge: organic demand & dev UX

• [00:27] North star metrics & real adoption vs spam

• [00:28] Roadmap: Cargo (containers), clustering, futures for compute

• [00:30] The ask: strategic partners & builders; grants/hackathons coming

Connect

https://acurast.com/

https://x.com/acurast

https://x.com/killercsecurity

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