The Sentinel Hub: 3rd Hub within the Cosmos Ecosystem after the Cosmos Hub and Iris Hub
I’m not going to talk about the fact that Sentinel raised one of the lowest amounts in an ICO (below $2 million), that has been one of the very few projects that has stayed above ICO price throughout the whole bear market, that has been one of the most active blockchain projects in github, that despite the team being anonymous due to the nature of the project it has managed to keep growing and getting trust from the community. I’m not going to talk about the fact that Sentinel was one of the winners of the Cosmos Game of Stakes validator competition or the fact that it has a working dVPN in several platforms including number 1 dVPN in Google PlayStore, being one of the few dApps with most real users in the whole crypto industry.
I’m going to talk about what matters to investors: the SENT ERC20 token and the coming token swap to the native cSENT using the SENT ERC20 tokens.
First of all, what is the cSENT token? The Sentinel hub is like a router to connect other blockchains (zones) like dVPN, dChat, etc. In order to choose a validator (like a mining pool in Bitcoin) to propose a block, a weighting mechanism exists with the amount of cSENT tokens delegated to each validator. In other words, the more cSENT are delegated to a specific validator, the more frequently this validator will be block proposer. So why would you want to buy cSENT tokens, and then, why would you want to delegate these tokens to a validator?
When you buy cSENT tokens you are not buying just a token. What you are really buying is a virtualized “mining” machine. Also, when you delegate these special tokens to a validator, you are actually like contributing “mining” power to a “mining pool”. In other words, by buying cSENT you become a “miner” in the Sentinel hub and also, unlike with the atom token currently, also a “miner” in all the Sentinel hub connected zones.
Now, the key questions is: ok, but what benefits do I get by becoming a “miner” of the Sentinel hub and zones? Many people think that the benefit would just be block rewards and transaction fees in the Sentinel hub and zones as cSENT tokens, however it is a lot more than this, and here it is where the great potential of the cSENT token actually is. The block rewards are really just a mechanism to punish the cSENT holders that are not delegating tokens because their cSENT will lose value due to the inflation mechanism in place. cSENT holders delegating their tokens will earn a reward after each block that they could delegate again, therefore compounding the rewards. But, again: this is NOT the main benefit.
After the Inter Blockchain Communication standards (IBC) are released and completed in the coming months, many zones (blockchains) will be connected to the Sentinel hub, including the dVPN zone, the dChat, etc. All the transaction fees going through this router, the Sentinel hub, and also within each zone will go to cSENT token holders and validators will take a small commission. But the most important is that these fees won’t be only in cSENT tokens, they will be in all the whitelisted fee tokens which could be pegged USD, pegged EUR, pegged BTC, and so on.
So, in summary: buying cSENT tokens makes you a “miner” of the Sentinel hub and all zones and you will not only earn block rewards for compound interest but also transaction fees going through the Sentinel hub and zones paid as pegged fiat, pegged btc, etc. This is really huge: you buy cSENT tokens, and then you will have a growing revenue of USD, EUR, BTC and other fee tokens.
And there is still more. The Sentinel hub will be connected to the Cosmos hub, to the Iris hub and even to the Polkadot relay chain. To whom will all these inter-hub and inter-zone transaction fees routing via the Sentinel hub go? Correct, to cSENT token holders, and a small commission for the Sentinel validators.
After publishing this article I got a call from Facebook saying they want to connect their Libra zone to the Sentinel hub also. Just kidding, but I’m sure it won’t be long before they reach out to the Sentinel team :)
Sentinel is planning for the hub validators to be PoS while zone validators will be PoA based on who is eligible. Eligibility criteria varies per zone: dVPN will have a different criteria vs dChat vs a Private Net Zone (a zone run for an organization which has both dVPN and dChat within). So, this way, even if people don’t truly trust the public Sentinel Network, they always can rely on Private Net Zones for their enterprise clients.
TestNet-1 will be open to external validators in the month of July or can even be sooner if you’d like to experiment :)
If you want to learn more or try the testnet the team will be very happy to help you: https://t.me/sentinel_co
