This article was updated on May 5, 2021 to include details on how to participate in the Sentinel IBC testnet.
Sentinel is pleased to announce that bandwidth sharing will become available for testing on the Sentinel Turing-4 Cosmos IBC-enabled testnet starting in May. This transition marks a significant leap forward for the development of decentralized applications (dApps) that can be built on top of the Sentinel protocol as part of its up-and-coming provably private Web3 stack.
At this point of time, Sentinel’s hub layer has been fully enabled for bandwidth sharing with the dVPN node and dVPN client built on Sentinel’s Cosmos-based chain pending release.
The following GitHub repo contains Sentinel’s custom-built modules which are used for the dVPN application logic.;
Sentinel has supported Cosmos from the very beginning. Cosmos IBC, which went live in February, enables dApps building on the Cosmos blockchain to interoperate with other blockchains in a fast and seamless way. As a result of the testnet migration, Sentinel users will be able to take advantage of the underlying Tendermint byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) protocol to enable cross-blockchain compatibility with instant finality.
Blockchains that use similar consensus algorithms, such as Proof-of-Stake (PoS), will be able to communicate with each other via Cosmos IBC using the Tendermint protocol. This alignment empowers dApps that build on top of the Sentinel protocol to make use of its provably private decentralized communications network.
In a statement about what the scalability and utility of Cosmos IBC means for the Sentinel network at large, co-founder and CEO of Exidio, a contributor to the Sentinel dVPN Protocol codebase, Dan Edlebeck said “We envision Sentinel having millions of daily users as we launch our whitelabel tech. Cosmos IBC will allow us to accommodate any amount of users to the Sentinel protocol through horizontal scalability. The focus being ease of use means we will allow any kind of payment that Sentinel dVPN nodes want to accept. In other words, any IBC compatible coin can potentially become a way to pay for Sentinel’s dVPN services.”
Echoing Edlebeck’s sentiment, Peng Zhong, the CEO of Tendermint said, “The permissionless transfer of tokens’ value across chains is a historic moment on the timeline to a valuable internet of blockchains. We will continue to focus on building the Cosmos Hub as the heart of the interchain — enabling trade and connecting politically sovereign chains to create a new paradigm for economic exchange. We have a defined roadmap in place to realize this future, and will continue to develop services for the Cosmos Hub that will create immense value for all the chains that connect to it.”
Sentinel is also very happy to be integrated with Keplr, an interchain wallet. The Keplr wallet integration will make the broader Sentinel network IBC-ready right after the Cosmos Hub is upgraded and right in time for the launch of Gravity DEX, a decentralized exchange bringing DeFi to Cosmos.
These additions complement the aspiration for people to see Sentinel as one of the first Cosmos-native assets. Hopefully, Sentinel’s most liquid trading pair will be priced in ATOMs to align with Cosmos’ vision that ATOM will be the reserve currency of the interchain, where every asset will be priced in ATOMS, making it both a store of value and a medium of exchange. Sentinel will continue to build on Cosmos so as to complement the peg between Sentinel and Cosmos both economically and technically.
Testing
Once the testnet build has passed inspection from contributors and the broader development community, Sentinel users will be able to monetize their bandwidth across blockchains. It is expected that this process will take between 3–4 days. Successful implementation will be determined by Sentinel validators.
In order to issue the governance update, validators must certify the update proposal. This will trigger the transition to the Cosmos IBC mainnet at which point users will be able to build new applications like provably private decentralized exchanges (DEXs) across blockchains. This rapid advancement of the Sentinel protocol will expand developer use cases exponentially.
Through this momentous development, Sentinel invites validators to begin testing the Sentinel dVPN protocol on Cosmos IBC testnet beginning Monday, May 3rd. If testing goes according to plan, the Sentinel network should migrate to IBC mainnet by May 24th. Validators who want to participate in the testnet will have to submit GenTx in the testnet repository.
The First IBC Transfer on Sentinel Turing 4 Testnet
One of the coolest new features implemented in the Sentinel Testnet, and soon on mainnet, is the ability to transfer tokens across blockchains using the IBC protocol. Sentinel is pleased to announce that today the first cross-chain IBC token transfer was executed between sentinel-turing-4 and morpheus-apollo-1. This is the first step for $DVPN to be traded on a DEX like Gravity or Osmosis when they launch in the next month.
Partake in the Testet
ITA Stakers, one of the Sentinel and Desmos validators, created a very simple UI that anybody can use to add testnets to the Keplr wallet and track open IBC channels.
Follow these steps to get started:
- Download and install the Keplr browser extension for Chrome or Brave
- Visit the Copernicus testnet tracker portal
- Press the “Add to Keplr button” for each of the chains across which you want to transfer tokens
- Get some tokens from the faucet or ask for tokens on the Sentinel Telegram group / Desmos discord server
- Press the “Transfer” button in the IBC Transfer section of Keplr
- Input channel-0 when requested
- The transaction tokens will take a few minutes to appear on the other chain after confirmation
Next Steps
Testing is going great! As with any testing, there is still plenty under the hood that needs to be reviewed for sentinel-turing-4 to become mainnet-ready.
We invite the whole community to try Sentinel’s dVPN exit node setup. You can get started by following instructions from the official repository.
About Sentinel
Sentinel, a decentralized VPN protocol, is built on Cosmos SDK-based architecture. Differing from centralized VPN companies that have been proven to log user data, Sentinel is an open-source, encrypted, peer-to-peer bandwidth marketplace accessible to anyone. Users can connect to any of the provably secure dVPN applications built on the Sentinel network. Individuals can also earn passive income by offering bandwidth to the marketplace. Live network statistics can be found at https://stats.sentinel.co.
Follow Sentinel *only* on official platforms:
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