Founded in 2018 as a nonprofit, Sentinel is a multi-protocol network helping users and applications access a global distributed service and resources marketplace. Ensuring high standards of pseudonymity, immutability, and global consensus, Sentinel serves as an ideal solution at the transaction and data layer. Let’s delve deeper to know more about the services it offers, its features and advantages, and how you can leverage Sentinel’s services.
Sentinel: An Open-Source Decentralized VPN Network
VPNs cater to a wide variety of objectives in this day and age of groundbreaking innovations tempered with high-level technological vulnerabilities. VPNs help access geo-restricted content. It connects to servers located in countries that have permission to access the content. VPNs keep users secure on public networks. Otherwise, leveraging the public network in places like airports may breach the privacy of a user. VPNs also offer a secure and provable encrypted tunnel that ensures data privacy from external parties such as the internet service provider of the user.
Driven by these needs, loads of users across the globe opt for VPNs. But, are all VPNs risk-free? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Most of the time there is no way to ensure that your VPN is not logging your usage information. As a user, you hardly have any method to ensure that your current chat applications do not share personal details about you and sell the data to third parties. There is hardly any service that guarantees to generate a ‘private key’ to encrypt your data and prove that it can’t store the key and access your data.
Evidently, the entire system of VPN usage is full of loopholes that may end up breaching your privacy a big way. This is where the Sentinel dVPN application comes in handy. It comes with several upgrades and robust competitive advantages over its competitors. Following are a few of the most vital of these advantages.
- Military Grade Encryption: Sentinel offers its users to choose between SOCKS5 or OpenVPN servers that are competent to enforce quantum-level encryption standards such as AES 256 or Poly 1305.
- Best-in-Class Transparency: Sentinel reveals the codebase of its dVPN application completely. As a user, you can go and check it on Sentinel’s GitHub profile along with the application MD5 Checksums for absolute provability.
- Globally Spread Servers: The servers of Sentinel are spread and hosted all over the globe. They are run by the community, for the community. As a user, you are free to choose the optimal server for the fastest browning and download speeds.
Sentinel: Decentralization and Blockchain
In Sentinel, the accounts are blockchain-based. The use of blockchain ensures that the users get to control their information. The nodes spread across the globe offer you the dVPN services and you are free to view the performance and statistics of these nodes on the network.
You can also host a Sentinel dVPN node on Ethereum. At present, dVPN node hosting is available on the Sentinel dVPN Testnet on the Ethereum Rinkeby Testnet. The protocols that node hosting is currently compatible with are Open VPN and SOCKS5. You need Cores-2 or more along with 4GB RAM and SSD storage of 20 GB or above.
Sentinel Stakeholders
Sentinel stakeholders fall into four broad categories. The validators are the consensus participants with the responsibility of securing the network and participating in the governance of the Sentinel ecosystem.
An end-user is the one who accesses a dVPN on the Sentinel framework. The node hosts host either an exit node or a relay node. The incentive for the node hosts is that they get to monetize on the provision of unused bandwidth to dVPNs built on the Sentinel network.
The fourth category of Sentinel stakeholders is known as the dVPN application creators who create a dVPN using the Sentinel dVPN zone as its infrastructure. The role of an application creator is crucial for the network since it is an application creator who acquires new users and does the marketing. They are the ones who generate revenue so that dVPN node hosts receive their pay.
Sentinel: Tokenomics
The token of the Sentinel network, which works as the fuel of the protocol, is marked by the ticker DVPN. Sentinel coins have a circulating supply of 2 billion DVPN coins. The maximum supply is also capped at 2 billion. The token is available for trading in exchanges such as Uniswap and MXC. On March 5, 2021, DVPN reached its all-time high price of $0.0434.
To give the network a robust foundation, Sentinel has decided to employ a halving-like model during the first period. It will incentivize staking while rewarding early adopters and community members with greater rewards. The second period will witness an exponentially decaying emission curve.
Sentinel has set a minimum delegators fee of 0.25% to avoid any validators gaining an unfair initial advantage at the start of the network. It has also decided on an “unbonding” time of 28 days and a maximum number of 50 validators on genesis to be increased through governance as Tendermint and Cosmos SDK matures.
Recent Updates
On April 1, 2021, Sentinel launched its native token DVPN on MXC, a centralized exchange offering dozens of unique digital asset pairings, advanced platform security, and features such as spot and derivatives trading. It is one of Asia’s topmost digital asset exchanges.
On March 27, 2021, Sentinel shared the mainnet genesis files in preparation for the transition to its own sovereign CøsmosSDK/Tendermint-based blockchain.
On March 19, 2021, Sentinel announced key marketing partnerships with Wachsman and Winkrypto to help Sentinel effectively engage with key industry media, promote their brand across channels, and connect with a rapidly growing community.
Take on the Future
Sentinel started with its biggest development, its transition to the Cosmos-based mainnet from March 27, 2021. To achieve mass adoption of decentralized VPN, Sentinel needs strong institutional backing. The Sentinel Foundation has been working hard on this need and planning to expand and strengthen its ecosystem onboarding some of the top minds in the blockchain industry.
