Acurast and Teneo: Exploring Confidential Execution for the Agent Economy
Two halves of the same problem
The agent economy has moved faster on some problems than on others.
Identity is largely solved. An agent can carry a portable, on-chain reputation that travels with it wherever it goes. Discovery is solved: builders have consoles and marketplaces to list, find and call agents. Payment is solved too. An agent can be paid per request, in stablecoins, with no contract, no invoice and nobody in the loop to approve it.However, execution is not solved.
Today, most production agents run on centralized hosting. Managed VMs, builder-run boxes, a cloud account somewhere. That is true of most agents on Teneo as well. So an agent can be identified on-chain, paid on-chain and audited on-chain, and then execute in plaintext on a server that one party controls.
For an agent that summarizes public data, that is perfectly fine. For an agent that holds keys, executes trades or reasons over a sensitive prompt, the host is the weakest link in the chain, and it is the only link still asking for blind trust.
Acurast has been making this argument from the infrastructure side for a while now: AI agents need sovereign infrastructure. Teneo has been making the mirror argument from the demand side, that without per-call payments, portable identity and a marketplace, agents stay demos. Two views of the same shift, arrived at from opposite ends of the stack.
This partnership is about closing the gap between them.
What Teneo does
Teneo is a decentralized AI agent network built on its own DePIN data layer. A global network of community-run Beacon nodes continuously gathers real-time public web data, and builders deploy agents on top of it that read that data, act on it, and get paid per call in USDC. The data an agent reasons over, the agent’s identity, and its payments are all decentralized, not just the platform it lists on. Each agent carries a gasless NFT identity alongside an ERC-8004 portable identity, so its reputation travels with it instead of being locked to a single platform. Payments settle per request through x402, the HTTP-native stablecoin payment standard, which is live today across multiple chains including Base and peaq.
Agent-to-agent settlement already works in production. Builders reach the network through a Go SDK, a [TypeScript/client, confirm] SDK, and a CLI that installs into any MCP-compatible client. Discovery runs through the Agent Console, where more than 180,000 users browse, deploy and call agents.
This is not a testbed. Teneo runs a decentralized data network of more than 300,000 registered Beacon nodes, has more than 760 deployed agents, and has processed over 1.5 million agent requests at roughly 35,000 a day. These are live workloads, paid for in real time, and they are exactly the kind of demand a confidential compute network should be able to serve.
What Acurast does
Acurast is not a hosting provider with a decentralized coat of paint. It is a verifiable execution layer.
Every deployment on Acurast runs inside the Trusted Execution Environment built into a smartphone’s hardware. It is the same class of secure enclave that protects mobile banking and payment credentials. Inputs and outputs stay sealed inside that enclave. The device owner cannot see them, Acurast cannot see them, and neither can Teneo. A trading agent’s strategy, an agent’s signing key, a user’s private prompt: none of it ever leaves the protected execution layer.
The devices themselves cannot be faked either. Processors have to pass hardware attestation before they can join the network, which is why Acurast can prove things about its fleet that most decentralized compute networks cannot verify about theirs.
This is the guarantee that pairs with Teneo’s agent identity. ERC-8004 proves who the agent is. Hardware attestation proves where and how it ran. Identity and execution, both provable, end to end.
None of this is theoretical, and none of it is new. Confidential AI agents already run on Acurast today. Through the Acurast Hub, developers deploy autonomous agents that manage assets and execute on-chain operations, with LLM inference running inside smartphone TEEs, invisible to node operators and third parties alike. Acurast processors already act as keyholders for tokenized assets in production. An agent trusted with a signing key on Acurast is not a thought experiment. It is how the network is already being used.
The tooling is live too. Codename Cargo brought compute containers to the network, so developers can package modularized workloads and deploy them without rewriting for a bespoke runtime. Dynamic Pricing lets the network price compute properly, rather than leaving each provider to guess.
How they work together
The most concrete piece of this partnership is also the least-discussed layer of the agent stack: how the money actually moves.
In February 2026, Acurast activated its smartphone compute network on Base with native USDC and x402 support. AI agents can now autonomously request, pay for and run compute jobs in real time. It is a genuine pay-per-request model for confidential compute, with no bridging and no off-chain settlement layer.
Teneo’s agents are already paid in USDC over x402, on Base among other chains.
Which means the loop closes without anyone having to build a bridge to close it. An agent is identified on-chain through Teneo. It gets paid per call in USDC over x402. It then pays for its own confidential execution in USDC over x402, inside a hardware-attested TEE on Acurast. Same standard, same chain, same stablecoin. No accounts, no API keys, nobody in the loop.
Each network also gets to retire the objection its critics reach for first. Teneo gets a credible answer to “but where does the agent actually run?” Acurast gets a credible answer to “but who is actually deploying agents on this?”
Why this works
What we will explore first
In a first step, the two teams will pick a live Teneo agent whose work is genuinely sensitive, such as a trading agent, a key-holding agent or an agent running inference over private prompts, and port it to Acurast as its execution backend.
From there, we will validate the payment path end to end on Base and prove the x402 loop runs in both directions: the agent gets paid, and the agent pays for its own compute. Then we will publish the teardown. Latency, cost per call, attestation flow, and an honest account of what confidential execution costs and what it buys. Not a press release, but a reference other builders can actually act on.
Looking ahead
Beyond the first reference workload, there is a lot of ground to explore. A co-funded builder bounty for agents that run on Acurast, list on the Teneo Console and settle in USDC. Joint research into what breaks when a hundred thousand agents go live without attested execution, a question both communities are circling and neither has answered. And there is real ecosystem overlap to build on, since both networks are already live on Base and peaq.
The broader point is this. The agent economy is being assembled in public, layer by layer, and most of those layers now exist. Identity exists. Payments exist. Demand exists, as Teneo’s request volume shows.What has been missing is somewhere trustworthy for all of it to run.
Stay tuned for an update on this partnership.
About Teneo
Teneo is a decentralized AI agent network powered by a DePIN data layer of more than 300,000 community-run Beacon nodes that gather real-time public web data. Builders deploy agents that read that data, act on it, and get paid per call in USDC, with portable on-chain agent identity, x402 micropayments, and an Agent Console used by more than 180,000 people. Together these provide the data, transaction, and discovery layers for the emerging agent economy. Read more on teneo-protocol.ai
About Acurast
Acurast is redefining compute by utilizing billions of smartphones, with no data centers required. This verifiable, scalable and confidential compute network enables developers to run secure applications on decentralized infrastructure at scale, without compromising speed or privacy.
Following its Mainnet launch and Token Generation Event in January 2026, Acurast has onboarded more than 270,000 devices across over 175+ countries and processed over 889 million on-chain transactions, making it the most decentralized verifiable compute network available today. This compute already powers mission-critical workloads with high-security and AI requirements.This is not just another DePIN protocol. It is a game-changer that is redefining how the world computes.
