Sentinel dVPN framework reduces the carbon footprint of the VPN industry
Individuals use VPN applications all over the world to access the internet securely, and the current VPN market is dominated by centralized VPN companies, which are energy inefficient as they depend on:
- Centralized Datacenter Utilization for VPN nodes
- Centralized Technical Operations
Mainstream VPN organizations require data centers that scale up energy requirements and hardware utilization over time. These organizations also require a centralized masternode and node query system, which also utilizes a significant amount of energy from the computing involved.
The Sentinel dVPN framework establishes a new paradigm of trusted and secure networking while also bringing in tremendous energy efficiency through the utilization of shared resources.
The bandwidth necessary for the Sentinel network already exists. It’s just lying dormant and unused.
All dVPNs built on Sentinel utilize the shared bandwidth of Sentinel’s global dVPN node host community and utilize the distributed compute resource of Sentinel’s global validator network.
Sentinel is building a bandwidth market anyone can easily integrate rather then building a single dvpn.
View the Sentinel block explorer at:
https://www.mintscan.io/sentinel/validators
The key aspects of Sentinel’s dVPN framework which contribute to an extremely energy-efficient ecosystem include:
- Distributed and Decentralized Global Network of dVPN Nodes with shared access for all whitelabels
- Using Cosmos-SDK as a layer-1 Framework
- Decentralized Node Query System
The mission of the Sentinel ecosystem is to connect unused bandwidth to a global marketplace where it can be monetized, with the goal of transforming p2p bandwidth into a digital commodity that is recognized on the same level as storage and computing power is in today’s world.
The energy-inefficient VPN Industry
1.Centralized Datacenter Utilization for VPN Nodes
Almost all mainstream centralized VPN applications utilize centralized data centers all around the world, which consume a large amount of electricity and generate a significant amount of electronic waste over their life cycles. Furthermore, as the infrastructure and electricity usage in these data centers are scaled up over time in correlation to the increase in demand by their customers, centralized VPN organizations create a greater carbon footprint as they grow larger.
Centralized VPN organizations do not seek to make use of unutilized bandwidth that is already existing and is not being made use of incorporate or residential environments and instead depend primarily on off-shore servers.
2.Centralized Technical Operations
Each VPN built on its own centralized server architecture depends on its own set of internally hosted servers for:
- User authentication
- Payment authentication
- Node query
Similar to how centralized storage applications such as DropBox maintain a centralized server query system to connect the users' interactions to the end-storage server, centralized VPN applications also maintain a centralized query server to display available nodes and have users connect to them.
Apart from being points of failure for the integrity of a centralized VPN network, the various internal centralized servers required to operate a mainstream VPN application result in additional energy and hardware requirements.
The energy efficiency generated by Sentinel’s dVPN framework
- Distributed and Decentralized Global Network of dVPN Nodes with shared access for all whitelabels
The Sentinel ecosystem removes the responsibility of exit-node management from organizations building applications on the Sentinel framework with the integration of Sentinel’s community-based node hosts.
Contrary to centralized VPN applications, which have to make use of data centers, dVPNs built on Sentinel can utilize Sentinel’s community-powered dVPN node host network, which makes use of unutilized bandwidth from residential and corporate environments all over the world.
Owners of dVPN applications built on Sentinel’s framework will have the ability to create service contracts with node hosts in the Sentinel ecosystem and establish certain standards of quality, paying only for what they consume (or having very customizable contracts), while also not having to manage the ownership of these servers themselves.
Sentinel recycles unused bandwidth and reduces the energy footprint that a user would have if the user would have compared to if the user were to use a centralized VPN application.
Centralized VPN providers that care about the environment will transition their new dVPN applications onto Sentinel’s dVPN framework.
“Operate a dVPN node at night and securely browse using a paid-dVPN built on Sentinel during the daytime with the revenue from your node.”
Every new dVPN built on top of Sentinel’s framework will help recycle more and more bandwidth while also bringing down the costs for consumers.
Users will be able to operate their dVPN node at night or whenever they are not utilizing their home internet network by using our automated software, which takes into consideration data cap and daily usage time.
“Operate a dVPN node at night and securely browse using a paid-dVPN built on Sentinel during the daytime with the revenue from your node.”
2. Cosmos-SDK as a layer-1 framework
Transactions-per-second (TPS) for blockchains using Proof-of-Work (POW) consensus has been relatively slow and extremely energy inefficient. In addition, many scaling solutions for such consensus networks require high capital investment for specialized hardware.
One of the key reasons why Sentinel choose Cosmos as a Layer 1 solution is for Cosmos’s extremely competitive energy efficiency.
Cosmos uses bonded Proof-of-Stake consensus where the network accepts votes from a fixed number of validators at a given point in time. This increases the overall throughput of transactions on the network due to a finite number of validators processing transactions (contrary to the ‘infinite’ participants in POW-based chains).
Tendermint’s BFT consensus system allows the Sentinel network to achieve transaction speeds faster than all existing POW networks, as a lack of definite finality encumbers POW networks. In bPOS-based systems such as Tendermint, near-instant finality is achieved by using round-robin-based voting by a finite number of Validators, by enabling token holders to ‘bond’ tokens to Validators that they deem trusted.
The high scalability of Sentinel’s chain allows for extremely competitive and low transaction fee prices.
Sentinel believes in the fairness of equal access; sustainability is irrelevant if only wealthy users who can afford extremely high gas fees can make transactions of a blockchain.
3. Decentralized Node Query System with smarter resource allocation and order book based pricing mechanism for bandwidth
The architecture of the Sentinel dVPN framework is truly resilient, distributed, and decentralized.
dVPN applications built on Sentinel utilize the shared compute resources in addition to bandwidth, as the validators supporting the Sentinel blockchain process various application-related transactions and operations. dVPNs built on Sentinel will only go down if Sentinel’s chain goes down.
dVPNs built on Sentinel use Sentinel’s chain, which is powered by a globally distributed network of validators for:
- User authentication (Public Key/Private Key)
- Payment authentication (Use of IBC/oracles)
- Node query (Sentinel’s on-chain node query)
Community-hosted nodes on Sentinel’s Cosmos-based chain directly communicate with the chain periodically to indicate their availability and status.
The end user’s dVPN application queries Sentinel’s blockchain to populate the list of available nodes and various other data about the node. dVPNs built on Sentinel are able to share Sentinel’s blockchain as their back-end infrastructure instead of having to establish their own centralized server architectures.
_________________________________
Every organization in the world must do its part in ensuring that the world is habitable and healthy for generations to come. The Sentinel ecosystem believes that it will lead a paradigm shift towards energy efficiency and decentralization in the global VPN industry, which is used by hundreds of millions if not billions of users.
Follow Sentinel *only* on official platforms:
LinkedIn | Medium | Twitter | Telegram — Announcements | Telegram — Community Group | Telegram Community Chats — Node Network Group, Chinese, Russian and Spanish
