The Sentinel $DVPN incentive programs

Bassey Saviour
4 min readJan 31, 2022

Sentinel has been around for some time and is known to focus on providing users with decentralized VPN services which makes them fully in charge of their data and digital footprints online.

Sentinel has introduced several $DVPN incentive programs on its native Cosmos-based Sentinel Hub. These incentive programs include:

  1. Bandwidth Mining Incentives
  2. $DVPN Token Staking Incentives
  3. White-label Operator Incentives
  4. Liquidity Mining Incentives
  5. dVPN User Incentives
  6. Grant Program and Initiatives Towards Developers Adoption

This article will talk and give us insights into these various programs.

About Sentinel

Sentinel is a web3 framework that provides a community-driven network of nodes that share bandwidth and can be used to build Decentralized VPNs and other services. The Sentinel ecosystem’s goal is to provide trustworthy and verifiable internet access to everyone. This will be accomplished by allowing businesses and individuals all around the world to use Sentinel’s Cosmos-based blockchain to build cost-effective, scalable, distributed, and decentralized networking solutions.

Incentive programs

  1. Bandwidth Mining Incentives:

‘Bandwidth Mining’ is the process of generating network incentives in exchange for contributing bandwidth to Sentinel’s dVPN network.

The ‘Bandwidth Mining Incentivization Pool’ will initially give $25,000 in $DVPN tokens every month in order to encourage the participation of between 4000–6000 nodes, which is the average number of nodes among Sentinel’s centralized competitors.

The pool’s monthly payout will be a predetermined sum, dispersed proportionally among all nodes who are qualified for the program. Nodes must demonstrate 99 percent or higher uptime in the daily award snapshot for every day of the month to be eligible for this incentive program. While node performance is monitored on a daily basis, rewards are issued periodically.

2. $DVPN Token Staking Incentives:

All paid-dVPN sessions that occur after the first two months of the new Desktop dVPN program release will be returned as part of Sentinel’s inaugural ‘$DVPN Token Staking Incentive.’ The refund will be up to $5 in $DVPN tokens per user, or up to $25,000 split proportionally among all users (per month), and users must have staked at least 20,000 $DVPN tokens in order to be eligible.

3. White-label Operator Incentives:

Sentinel plans to reward newly launched white-label apps with a fixed-size grant that will be delivered over the course of six months (if a minimum threshold of subscriptions is reached). A bonus will be given to the white-label client who reaches certain subscription and session-related milestones. After the Desktop client is released, specific details will be given at a later time.

4. Liquidity Mining Incentives:

Sentinel will aim to promote liquidity provision from the community after the launch of the Gravity DEx by delivering a prize that will be given on a regular basis.
More information will be released once we know whether or not Gravity DEx will include automatic incentive distributions. We will look to give incentives manually if automatic incentive distributions are not possible or will take too long to deploy.

5. dVPN User Incentives:

Sentinel dVPN application users will be able to earn incentives by:

  1. Downloading Sentinel dVPN applications (Desktop CLI/GUI)
  2. Consuming bandwidth from the Sentinel dVPN network and spending $DVPN tokens

This incentive program will be similar to Sentinel’s initial ‘utility drop’, and will begin after the release of the Sentinel’s new dVPN Desktop application.

6. Grant Program and Initiatives Towards Developers Adoption:

Sentinel will announce a funding program and other developer adoption incentives within the next month. Our goal is to build a vibrant developer community around Sentinel by attracting developers who care about privacy and who can help the Sentinel Bandwidth Marketplace become more appealing to customers, node providers, and white-label operators by contributing to Cosmos SDK development.

Conclusion

Sentinel’s Ethereum-based dVPN network, which is primarily driven by the Sentinel dVPN and Velocity dVPN (built on Sentinel) Android applications available on the Google Play Store, has generated a significant amount of usefulness, with over 400,000 registered devices using the network. Sentinel’s dVPN structure, however, cannot be truly decentralized due to Ethereum’s constraints in terms of throughput and transaction scalability.

Learn more about Sentinel:

LinkedIn | Medium | Twitter | Telegram — Announcements | Telegram — Community Group | Telegram Community Chats — Node Network Group, Chinese, Russian and Spanish

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