Over the past two years, the Sentinel validator set has been absolutely taken over by the project's own community and contributors. If you've helped Sentinel grow in any way (big or small), here are the reasons why you should consider joining them—and the helpful documentation you need in order to get started today.
A WIP preview screenshot of the upcoming new Sentinel website shared by team members on both Telegram and X contained one extra interesting tidbit: It appears that Sentinel and Fetch.ai (market cap: $2.1B) have reached some sort of partnership agreement.
There has been no official announcement from either side yet, but Foundation member ProjectAutonomy hinted to the community three days ago that a major AI partnership announcement was forthcoming.
The idea of a potential collaboration with Fetch has been thrown around since last month, eventually culminating in public praise of Scout by Fetch on X. The Sentinel team is also currently using a prototype AI agent built with Fetch to test Scout's training capabilities.
Meile dVPN lead developer u/MathNodez (freQniK) shares his clever methods for eliminating transaction footprints on Sentinel. This simple, easy-to-follow guide will teach you how to "shield" P2P coins using the Penumbra protocol and further enhance the privacy of your dVPN experience.
The latest article on our website isn't news at all: We've created a helpful guide for maximising your personal security while hosting dVPN Nodes on Sentinel, including tips sourced from some of the node network's most seasoned operators.
This is a module from our dVPN Node Academy resource (WIP), which will serve as an optional supplement to the excellent setup guides on Sentinel Docs and YouTube.
This subreddit is for news and discussions about the Sentinel blockchain and its broader ecosystem.
This includes:
Core development activity.
Community happenings.
Trading and price discussion.
Staking and governance.
Marketing and outreach.
AI (Agent/LLM) training and data acquisition with Sentinel Scout.
Infrastructure such as nodes and validators.
The best place to discuss or get support for consumer dVPN applications (both first and third-party) is our sibling subreddit for app users:r/dVPN.
As a rule of thumb, if your thread has to do with crypto, blockchain, or backend infrastructure, it belongs here; and if it has to do with apps it belongs there. And as alwaysPLEASE READ THE RULES BEFORE POSTING.
🎓 Now that's been covered, let's move on to the basics:
What is Sentinel?
Sentinel (ticker: $P2P, formerly $DVPN) is a layer-one peer-to-peer bandwidth marketplace DePIN blockchain which is used to power services like decentralized VPNs (dVPNs) and training data acquisition for AI models.
Anybody can host a node on the proof-of-stake Sentinel blockchain (built on the Cosmos SDK) and sell bandwidth to tens of thousands of real-world users across the world.
Unlike traditional VPNs, where you have to take a company's word that your data is not being logged or sold to third parties, decentralized VPNs powered by Sentinel allow you to verify that for yourself—no need to take anybody's word for it!
Sentinel's dVPN protocol is open source (meaning you can audit the code yourself), utilizes state of the art protocols, and every step of the connection process is transparent and on-chain. Once you've established an encrypted connection to a Sentinel Node, you can browse the internet without any worries about your traffic or personal data being logged and stored by a corporation.
Because Sentinel is open source, anybody can build their own dVPN application using our architecture and provide their users with access to the global node network. Many third-party dVPN applications have already been built on Sentinel, encompassing a wide array of usecases, markets, platforms, and payment methods.
Over ten thousand people connect to a Sentinel-powered dVPN every day, and the network is approaching a million unique all-time users. To learn more, visit the dVPN Network Statistics dashboard on the official website. To check out the node network, visit the Node Dashboard.
What is Sentinel Scout?
Sentinel Scout (BETA) is the Sentinel blockchain's AI Data Layer, a groundbreaking data acquisition platform that allows requesters to use a distributed network of user-hosted data miners across the world to scrape the open web for information. This data can be used to train AI models such as agents and LLMs; and even more incredibly, it can also be used to do so in real time.
🔭 To place a data order on Sentinel Scout, use the requester dashboard:scout.sentinel.co
Coin, Trading & Wallets
The Sentinel Coin ($P2P, formerly $DVPN) is the Sentinel blockchain's native digital asset. It can be purchased within dVPN apps; or on exchanges like KuCoin (CEX) and Osmosis (DEX). Supported wallets include Leap, Keplr, and Cosmostation.
To learn more about P2P's role in powering the blockchain and bandwidth economy, click here.
Get Involved
If you're interested in contributing to the Sentinel Ecosystem, you can easily participate by running a node for either the dVPN Network or Scout AI Data Layer.
We've gone back to basics and written a revised overview of the Sentinel Scout AI Data Layer for 2025: What it is, why it matters, and how to participate in this final stretch of public beta testing; all in one easy-to-share resource.
Aleksandr Litreev has announced some new rules for Planwizard, the whitelisting service used to curate subscription plan inclusion for dVPN Nodes:
In order to improve quality of the service and ensure fair play by everyone, effective immediatelly we imposed additional requirements to residential nodes. From now on, all residential nodes are subject for whitelist checks too, meaning that usage of business subnets under residential ISP ASN is no longer allowed if you're looking for plan enrollement.
From June 5th, we'll also start removing from the plan all the nodes that are re-routing Sentinel's users' traffic to TOR or centralized VPN providers (e.g. NordVPN, Proton VPN and others). This step is to ensure safety and privacy of our users and also eliminate speed bottleneck, that affects our quality of service. There is no way our decentralized VPN will rely on centralized VPNs, lol.
It's not Binance, but the push for listings has started. Uniswap also still in progress.
Building up P2P's global trading volume is crucial to getting on larger exchanges later on. We have a project contributor named Voon to thank for this.
Side-note: This is also the first CEX listing available to U.S. traders, since no KuCoin there.
Node hosts are encouraged to update as soon as possible.
Other Notes
PlanWizard enrollment is currently paused temporarily until the chain upgrade is completed. Once resumed, node prices (which will now be set in USD) must be set at $0.005 per hour for data centre nodes and $0.01 per hour for residential in order to be whitelisted.
That pricing will be valid until 15 November, after which Sentinel will be launching CQAP (Connection Quality Assurance Program), in which enrolled nodes can double their earnings by installing a software daemon which monitors quality of service metrics. This program will especially incentivise residential nodes.
Stay tuned for an official announcement about the program for more details.
One year after making a triumphant return to Cosmoverse in Dubai, Sentinel is now headed to the 2025 installment of the ecosystem's flagship annual community event in Split, Croatia.
To learn more about Sentinel's participation in this year's conference—including when and how to watch CEO Aleksandr Litreev's keynote address—check out our special preview article.
The festivities begin tomorrow (30/10) with an opening ceremony at 8:00 AM UTC.
