About

Sentinel is an open-source framework for decentralized VPNs (dVPN) and other Web3 services, aiming to ensure universal internet access in a trusted manner. Built on the Cosmos blockchain, it allows for decentralized, scalable, and distributed networking solutions. Sentinel’s ecosystem supports the development of independent dVPN applications, promoting transparency, security, and user privacy through its decentralized nature and no-log policy.

History

Sentinel, founded in 2017, is a novel blockchain protocol that both facilitates and incentivizes the sharing of unused Internet bandwidth allocated to network participants worldwide. In this case bandwidth is used in a virtual private connection (VPN), a synthetic bridge of sorts which connects one private network to another; use cases are numerous, including privacy, censorship-aversion, enterprise mobility, and file sharing. Colloquially, VPNs are connections "to somewhere else" which may allow, for example, users to stream media content not licensed in their home country or access cheaper airfares only available abroad. Demand for these solutions by non-commercial users is growing rapidly. Perhaps the most important distinction in introducing Sentinel is that it is actually not a VPN (virtual private network), a fact prominently highlighted across its documentation. Instead, Sentinel is positioning itself as the first Web3.0 infrastructure provider for secure Internet connectivity (i.e., anonymous, encrypted, and uncensored). Sentinel has established a bandwidth marketplace usable by developers of new projects, and importantly also "legacy" VPN providers, to service new VPN connections as they are initiated by users or customers. Everyday Internet users are empowered to share their connections with those looking to engage such services, with Sentinel providing the means to securely authenticate and start communicating with a VPN node. Sentinel maintains a single branded dVPN application, simply Sentinel dVPN, using the publicly-available infrastructure available to unaffiliated developers alike. The project focuses on the interoperable marketplace rather than its branded offering, which is logical given the former expands Sentinel's total addressable market significantly.

Miners on the Sentinel blockchain provide Internet bandwidth rather than computational power in exchange for DVPN tokens, specifically by provably allocating a portion of their connection throughput to share. The blockchain is purpose-built to commoditize this Internet bandwidth and is open-soruce, an important distinction when evaluating the trust level of security-sensitive digital infrastructure. This is achieved by establishing a standardized protocol for dynamically allocating bandwidth to end-user VPN connections. This model, which provides benefits over centralized VPN providers (i.e., open-source, provable encryption, zero logging), is coined by Sentinel as the decentralized VPN (dVPN).

In the past two decades Internet access has spread to literally every country, a remarkable feat by any measure. However, Internet access remains far from equitable and uniform with some countries implementing regulations such as content blocking, surveillance, Internet blackouts, or even complete embargoes. Further, licensing restrictions for media have made the concept of VPNs relatively mainstream in the 2010s, helped by the increasing speed of such connections as infrastructure develops. While licensing issues frustrate many, Sentinel (and VPNs more widely) are products of necessity for some whose safety and security depend on them. The Internet is inherently a force for freedom, and thus its effects are unpredictable–this presents a risk to authoritarian regimes who may target individuals or groups of people for their engagements online. Sentinel's network has been used by activists in Iraq, among other places, to allow the free discourse of dissidents, activists, and voices of change on the Internet.

VPN service providers, like other cloud-intensive businesses, typically reserve capacity with their cloud providers to provide reliable service when many users use the service at once. This is costly because this model ensures the provider is always buying extra resources that, by design, will almost always go unused. Sentinel instead allows for the trustless, efficient exchange of payment for bandwidth access. Bandwidth access specifically is referring to the routing of a user's Internet traffic through relays to an exit node, which then retrieves the requested Internet content. Such relay routing is inherently more private than centralized VPN connections simply because there is a separation of the concerns of "who" and "what"–no one network participant knows both who you are and what you are doing, in contrast to a centralized VPN who does. Connections are additionally end-to-end encrypted preventing VPN monitoring by curious or malicious actors at any level. And lastly, the wide distribution of possible endpoints a Sentinel-routed request may pass through and the fact that many are residential connections, Sentinel's dVPN infrastructure is inherently challenging to censor or block by repressive Internet policies.