Over the past few months, the Sentinel team has built a ground-breaking protocol layer resulting in the first-ever successful blockchain project whose primary focus is facilitating the distribution of digital resources in a useful and practical manner. Sentinel is proud to be the first to release an active blockchain bandwidth resource monitoring and on-chain payment gateway mechanism.
To provide our growing community timely development updates and complete visibility into the project, we are launching the official Sentinel blog on Medium. The Sentinel blog serves to:
- Announce new features and releases
- Thoroughly communicate the features and change logs of newly released and upcoming programs
- Provide the community insight into the most relevant news concerning digital resource distribution, privacy, scalability, and other related topics
- Publish the status of parallel projects within Sentinel
- Provide a platform to assess the feedback from users and construct user-driven excellence
The Sentinel Development Team
The Sentinel development team has a unique structure which has allowed the team to push an incredible development pace and quickly innovate on the Ethereum platform to develop one of the most advanced resources sharing smart contracts solutions available.
Our multi-national development team’s ability to recruit and manage elite polymath talent in an environment where controllable burn rate can have lead to an active and highly productive code output. Sentinel only recruits developers from the most prestigious institutions in the world; of which the core Sentinel team members are alumni. The development team has created an in-house curriculum to immerse recruits in Blockchain development as quickly as possible quickly. However, all new hires have an extensive background in node.js and python before training with our team.
Sentinel Development Office and Expansion
The importance of deploying on-site development environment.
Most crypto-currency projects primarily depend on remotely-contracted back-end developers. The Sentinel team currently has over 20 developers in one physical fully equipped office. The office has conference rooms and full support staff. This office allows a physical space where developers can work with one another, as a team, in a professional setting: focusing on specific goals and deliverables.
The Sentinel development team is looking forward to expanding further with the opening of a new office. This move leads to a massive rise in contributors and hence speed up project development.
Shortly, we plan on announcing legal partners and advisors.
Key Milestones and Latest Releases
The Sentinel team has been pushing an agile and fast paced development schedule outputting over 300 development hours every week. Since the ICO, the development team has made progress on multiple fronts:
- The initial launch of the sentinelgroup.io website. A newly redesigned website is set to launch soon.
- The release of the Sentinel LitePaper v1.0
- Version 0.0.32 release of the Sentinel Desktop Client for Linux, Windows, and Mac — check out the releases page on GitHub here.
- Sentinel hosted a highly successful airdrop/testdrop (where participants tested the dVPN and submitted a screenshot) with 2500+ dVPN Sessions consuming 387GB in 4 days. During the airdrop, the Telegram Official Group saw a massive torrent of 10K+ messages with the group exploding to 3500+ from just 600 during that period (currently at over 4000 members).
- On-going research & development of SOCKS5 proxies and TOR network for the relay and exit node routing of packets. Development implementation can be observed by following respective GitHub branches.
- Development of the Android App on the mobile front and on-going research for using OpenVPN protocols on iOS. If you can help with the implementation, do not hesitate to reach out to us via GitHub
- Other research-oriented exploration — fingerprint for AUID, using OpenVPN protocols on iOS, storage options for nodes.
Lite Paper v1.0
A simplified introduction to the Sentinel project.
If you are new to Sentinel, the LitePaper is an excellent, simplified introduction to the project’s vision and goals. You can read it on our GitHub repo. The Litepaper covers the:
- The architecture of the Sentinel Network
- Overview of the Identity Chain, Service Chain and Transactions Chain
- Brief about the Governance on the Service Chain and interaction of Services with Resource Consumers/Users
- Service and Resource Marketplace and related development of harnessing distributed resources
- Overview of the roadmap, current R&D focus and dev team
The team intends to launch a blog series that describes what Sentinel does and how the project works under the hood. However, this paper simplifies the idea of Sentinel and presents the working details of each system as much as possible.
Sentinel Wallet v0.0.32
The latest Sentinel Wallet with VPN testnet
The Sentinel Desktop Client is the first working blockchain bandwidth resource monitoring and on-chain payment gateway mechanism.
- A fully functional ERC20 wallet was developed on Electron and fully integrated with the Rinkeby Testnet.
- The first OpenVPN implementation on react-native that fully integrates with Sentinel’s proprietary bandwidth master node system allowing for community members to host containerized ‘exit nodes’ that enable users to tunnel through OpenVPN while making use of the secure payment gateway system.
- The Sentinel VPN prototype client is currently operating on the Rinkeby Testnet and users can receive free test tokens through the wallet that may be used to connect to an OpenVPN exit node on the TestNet.
- Base governance decides how the testSent redeems against ‘resource’ consumption. Has protection to ensure the network isn’t spammed with transactions by bad actors.
- Authorization of services, payment of unpaid blocks and reporting of transactions to resolve discrepancies are all part of the current v0.0.32 release.
Currently, the term “resource” primarily refers to bandwidth. With time, it may extend to other metrics such as computational ability, storage.
Current and future releases can be followed here on our releases page on the GitHub Repo.
Most networks do not fully utilize the non-fungible properties of the conventional blockchain structure. Sentinel has innovated a mechanism by which a master node inscribes data onto the Ethereum blockchain. This data, derived from smart contracts pulls metrics such as bandwidth usage and duration of the session from client session data. This data is recorded to validate payments and to create a trustless payment gateway (can think of it as an escrow system) between the end-user and community member who is sharing their bandwidth. You can check out the code on GitHub here.
Upcoming Features
The Sentinel development team has been working on some exciting developments that aim to change the way people interact with the Sentinel Network fundamentally.
1. Secure SOCKS5 Packet Routing
World’s first SOCKS5 dVPN node implementation on blockchain
The Sentinel team is proud to bring you another first in the industry. This feature soon to be available with nodes choosing between offering a SOCKS5 Node v/s OpenVPN Node along with the option to exit into TOR.
Stakeholders who primarily benefit from the added benefit of SOCKS5 dVPN nodes are:
- Users who place primary preference on speed and geographical freedom
- Users who use services that are partial to a geographic location to access information
- Users who need looking to exchange data and information in a peer to peer fashion, without the worry of a cVPN (centralized VPN) routing data.
- Corporate-companies look to secure their networks by routing traffic only through specific nodes. The organization themselves may host these nodes. This process creates a private network. We are looking to working with a few crypto-currency projects, which are interested in establishing private networks for themselves.
- People with concerns about privacy, can create a private network with their home router connecting to Sentinel and route all traffic through the Sentinel Network for instant anonymity across all devices without needing to connect independently from multiple devices.
2. TOR Exit Node Hosting
Service Node & Resource Node hosts achieve immunity by exiting into TOR
TOR has been the go-to anonymity tool for privacy activists, whistleblowers, journalists and governments until it was recently proven compromised. The primary flaw is that the exit node is un-encrypted. Sentinel implements exit-nodes that exit into the TOR network which ensures encryption everywhere. The added advantage is that it eradicates TOR’s vulnerability to mass DDOS attacks and makes owning node farms to trace node hop-paths meaningless.
3. Android Mobile App Development
The dVPN goes mobile
Sentinel intends to launch the first mobile blockchain based decentralized or P2P VPN application opening up a whole new world of possibilities. Not only will the upcoming release lay foundation stones for the development of the ability for mobile phones to act as relay nodes but it also signals the beginning of Sentinels immersion into the domain of mesh networking.
Sentinel has already initiated mesh networking development indirectly by developing the first blockchain based bandwidth resource monitoring, and incentivization protocol that currently monitors SOCKS5 and OpenVPN sessions and the development plans to configure the protocol to account for mobile hotspot sessions as well.
Ongoing android development is updated regularly here. All contributors are encouraged to check out the code and share feedback via issues or even better in pull requests.
*Check back here for news regarding the upcoming swaps, mixer, and other features in upcoming blog posts.
About Sentinel
Sentinel employs a multi-chain architecture to secure data and exchange resources between people and applications — Legacy, Enterprise Apps, Mobile Apps, and dApps. Sentinel has developed the first working blockchain bandwidth resource monitoring and on-chain payment gateway mechanism.
Follow us on Medium to stay up to date with the latest Sentinel announcements and developments.
View exchanges for trading $SENT at the Sentinel website.
Check out and follow Sentinel’s official social media channels:
Twitter | Telegram — Official Group | Telegram — Announcements only
