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Sneak peek of the Sentinel Desktop App v0.1.1 which is currently under development. New features will be announced soon!
Here’s a preview of the Sentinel dChat: [av_video src='https://youtu.be/T1H8exU6D7I' format='16-9' width='16' height='9']
Preview of Sentinel dChat aka Sentrix, the second Service on the Sentinel Network after the dVPN
This is the first time that team behind Sentinel Network has engaged in an AMA. Below are the questions, answers and messages/replies by the team & other community members during the 60 minute session.
Let’s start off by asking what exactly is Sentinel Network?
In simple terms the Sentinel Network is a blockchain based P2P driven ecosystem that has the key prerogative of allowing service providers to monetise on their bandwidth provision and to allow end-users to consume these services in a safe and trustless manner. Exchange of digital resources whether it is storage, computing power or bandwidth in a decentralised environment requires a sort of consensus. The fact is that a bandwidth user could report a different outcome from the service provider. The same way a bitcoin miner could report false work. Sentinel has developed the first bandwidth metering consensus system in active operation, essentially meaning that p2p bandwidth distribution in its decentralised network is fully confirmed by it’s consensus governance measures. On the Ethereum Rinkeby chain where the dVPN is operational there is a network of masternodes observing p2p tunnels and then inscribing the session usage metrics into an unpaid block on the chain. Users of the dVPN are prohibited from accessing the dApp until this block is satisfied. On the Tendermint network, Sentinel uses the bPOS validator network to act as the confirmation consensus for bandwidth usage. Not through the direct observation of tunnels but through the reporting of the usage logs & proofs to the network.So it is its own blockchain? Is it based on a fork of another project?
Yeah, its Sentinel’s own blockchain. It is not a fork of another project. Currently $SENT token is an ERC20 token and we will soon move to our native token on the Tendermint blockchain. Our own blockchain consensus is bBFT (bonded BFT) and is developed using Tendermint Core and the Cosmos SDK. You can check the live testnet here — https://explorer.sentinel.coThere are 3 Sentinel tokens on the market. Have you guys thought of rebranding?
Sentinel was publicly launched in October 2017, before the time that any other project even proposed the name Sentinel. Regardless Sentinel branding continued while two other highly funded “Sentinel’s” were conceived afterwards. Both of the other Sentinel projects are less than 1/3 of their ICO values while Sentinel retains its $2M ICO mark — this is due to a number of reasons pertaining to true utility. Sentinel does not plan to change its branding as we believe that the name and branding is apt to the actual utility being provided on a daily basis, and we are confident that we will become the premiere ‘Sentinel’ within the next year. No. We never intended to rebrand. We have the ticker $SENT and we were the first to claim it. However, since we are a network, we plan to make Sentinel Network quite popular in future rather than just ‘Sentinel’ as a brand.I did some research on Cosmos and saw that you guys were early adopters of Tendermint and will potentially be one of the first projects to launch once cosmos goes mainnet. Could you explain why the team chose Cosmos/Tendermint?
Had to choose our own blockchain as we could not power the consensus with shared security. We would not have had the control on governance as required. Also, we explored other engines but they all failed to live up to the standards and vision of Tendermint due to which we chose the same. Just did some googling and found some medium documentations for others here: https://medium.com/sentinel/sentinel-network-the-transition-to-tendermint-within-the-cosmos-network-9e0022bfb03c Wow, the Sentinel team has quite a lot of documentation, great for education.Why is governance so important for you guys (reason why you built on Tendermint very early)?
Multiple reasons: 1) We have to make sure both Service Provider & Service User agree on consumption. 2) We will not only incentivise people for doing a good job running nodes, but also need to penalise when they DON’T do a good job. Good here will be perfectly defined. 3) The need to develop a network where governance can be shared, but each Service/dApp might have it's own way to utilise the same. For example: dChat, a Service, might primarily use 2 resources — network and storage from independent resource providers. Although computing is used, it will be accounted for in the costs of the bandwidth and storage.Could you perhaps explain the value proposition for building on Tendermint?
In simple words:- Interoperability among chains:
- The Cosmos Network
- Vision of Tendermint and their roadmap that aligns with the Cosmos SDK
- Active developer centric ecosystem around the project
- We saw the potential early. In fact, we saw the potential around 1 year before Binance started to build it’s own DEX on the same infrastructure that Sentinel Network is built on.
