Sentinel Changes Ticker to P2P, Commits to Bandwidth Narrative as DEX Push Begins

The ticker moniker refresh teased by the team late last year in now fully confirmed and underway: The Sentinel Coin will now be going by "P2P" (peer-to-peer) on platforms such as wallets, blockchain explorers, and exchanges.

Before we dive deeper into the change, it should first be noted that this change is purely superficial and only affects how the coin will be referred to within the UI of those platforms. All coin balances and project infrastructure will remain the same, and no action is needed on the part of investors, stakers, node hosts, or validators.

This is Sentinel's second ticker change since the project's genesis as a layer two Ethereum testnet: The coin (originally an ERC20 token) traded under the moniker of "SENT" from 2018 until the launch of Sentinel's current Cosmos SDK-powered mainnet blockchain in 2021.

Overview | Sentinel Docs

The DVPN coin is a governance coin that allows staked coin holders to decide the future of the protocol, including every implementation detail. DVPN coin revolves around its functions as a:

Sentinel Docs

Bandwidth Bazaar

Sentinel's powerful battle-tested consumer blockchain and its distributed network of bandwidth-sharing nodes are becoming something much bigger than a framework for decentralized VPN applications. The shift away from the narrower "DVPN" moniker is intended to highlight Sentinel's status as layer one DePIN for internet bandwidth; a scope similar to Akash Network (compute power) or Jackal Protocol (cloud storage).

This is not a new development or shift in the team's priorities, but rather an objective which has been baked into the project's DNA since the latter part of last decade. Sentinel's original 2018 "litepaper" even makes reference to it.

Though it remains the most significant of the Sentinel blockchain's protocols, dVPN will soon be complemented by the Sentinel Scout AI Data Layer—which the development team is now putting the finishing touches on. Scout will be open to third-party development and integrations much in the same way that dVPN has been, and even more protocols and usecases will likely join these two in the future.

Eureka!

Changes to the Sentinel Coin have been more than superficial: Four years after its departure for Cosmos, Sentinel made a return (of sorts) to its old home: 33,000 P2P was successfully transferred to Ethereum via an IBC Eureka transfer in late April.

Since 2021, DVPN/P2P has not been an easy asset to acquire or hold for investors without roots in the Cosmos Ecosystem. Aside from Cosmos-centric wallets and DEXs such as Leap, Keplr, and Osmosis; the only platform with Sentinel investment support has been KuCoin, which is not available in some countries (including the United States).

Though this Eureka transfer mechanism still seems to be in a test phase, it is a concrete precursor to future DEX listings, wallet support, and social exposure within crypto's largest altcoin ecosystem—and potentially the harbinger for a major boom in trading volume.

P2P/ETH and P2P/USDT pools are already being seeded by the Sentinel Foundation on Uniswap, a massive Ethereum-based DEX which just became the first DEX in history to surpass three trillion USD in all-time trading volume.

The Future of dVPN

Resource allocation towards dVPN development will only be increased as the new AI protocol brings revenue to the network, according to the core development team. It was also revealed in November that Scout has been largely developed by a new squad of contributors "who are not involved in day-to-day dVPN development."

In fact, the team has recently completed talks with an established centralized VPN which boasts over 100k daily paying users and over 5 million downloads on the Google Play Store. That VPN (which we won't name here) is now actively in the process of onboarding with Sentinel and becoming a dVPN.

Sentinel's dVPN network already sees over ten thousand unique users per day, an astonishing level of real-world consumer adoption for blockchain-based apps. This new player in the ecosystem will boost that total by somewhere in the range of 1000%.

Household names within the Sentinel community such as NORSE Labs, MathNodes, Independent and Valt Data will continue to polish their products and expand to new platforms. The team has also stated they want to port their flagship application Sentinel Shield dVPN to desktop once Scout is launched.

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