cool looks like we're all here. I'd like to welcome you guys again for
yeah, so we have two speakers today. We have Alex, who is the CEO of Solar Labs as well as Sevens, the communication lead here at Sentinel, who is the project that we'll be featuring today in today's Koopoint fireside chat. As always, my name is Tim, the host for today's talk, and the head of social here at Koopoint. So I'd like to welcome the two guests. Perhaps you guys can start
to your personal backgrounds, as well as what the project's all about. Sevens, why don't you go ahead and start.
Hi, Tim. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for arranging this. Yeah, basically, I'm Seven. My background is in primarily TV and advertising, and I moved into corporate comms. And then from corporate comms, I found the world of crypto and worked for kind of consultant with several different companies.
And in 2019, found Sentinel, and just kind of joined community and just started working and carried on working, contributing. Basically, here I am now. Yeah, so we've been kind of running lots of different things with with Sentinel in terms of kind of community engagement over the past couple of years.
Kind of really now coming into its own form now, the actual networking range of applications that we've got are going to start ramping up in the next year. So basically, my whole role is purely from a from a constantly perspective is to kind of get Sentinel out there and the range of applications that are going to be released and the teams that are working on our platform to just kind of get them out there and get get people using and get the people understanding kind of what exactly is decentralized VPN and the kind of bandwidth marketplace.
That Sentinel is awesome. And Alex, why don't you start with just a high level intro to yourself. Yeah, sure. So yeah, my name is Alexander, and I'm a CEO of Sol Labs. We are the company, which is frankly building on top of the Sentinel blockchain, we making this client oriented mobile applications, which are providing with a DVP platform.
I started initially in 2017 as a digital human rights activists, back in Russia, then moved to Estonia for doing my own VPN business. And in 2021, I met guys from Sentinel, and basically decided to move my business forward with a decentralization and basically started to move my business forward.
And basically started Sol Labs at this time, and then joined Sentinel within its efforts of developing the product and expanding the expanding the chain itself. So yeah, that's, that's pretty much it.
We are currently shipping products for private customers such as mobile applications for DVP and on iOS, Android, macOS, and more, as well as we can, helping business customers, other companies build their own applications on top of the Sentinel so sort of a white labeling program
that is meant to spread DPM technology as broader as possible.
I guess a natural next question would be the project itself, Sentinel, and how it's different from traditional VPNs. What exactly is a decentralized VPN and how are you guys different
Alex, you want to take that one I'll jump in after you.
Absolutely. So, what is the Sentinel DVP and is it is a decentralized VPN service, which is based on top of the blockchain, which is built on top of customers decay, and the idea of central VPN is that there is no single.
Let's say, entity that users have to trust, because if we're talking about traditional VPN services that are which are centralized.
You, frankly, you have to trust them if you use them because you believe the award that they do not keep logs that they do not cooperate with the government agencies or third parties and do not sell your data, and etc.
That is not the case with the with the decentralization that is there in the Sentinel DVP and because there is a no single entity to go after there is over 10,000 nodes VPN nodes available worldwide to which you can use to go online,
you can use them as the internet gateway to access various internet services and apps, which are, which might be blocked in certain regions, but you can basically access them using that.
And there is, if we talk about centralized VPN, the centralized VPNs, they have your information about your identity from the very beginning when you pay for the subscription using your credit card, or whatsoever.
You already know who you are and you just believe their word that they do not keep logs and do not associate your internet activity with your identity anyhow.
Well, it's not the case with the Sentinel VPN as no one on the chain have any clue who you exactly are. And basically, everything that you do is concealed and stays behind the just an anonymous web 3.0 wallet, which gives little or less your information about who exactly you are and your identity.
Besides that, decentralization gives us far more opportunities in terms of combating censorship. Because if we're talking about centralized VPNs, certain countries such as, let's say, China or Russia or Iran and many others, where there is not that much online freedoms, let's say like that.
People often see that VPN services themselves are being blocked. For example, NordVPN is not available in many countries such as, such as China and ProtonVPN doesn't work well in certain countries such as Russia, because they're banned there.
And that happens because governments, they have a specific legal entity to go after to ban it and make sure that their service is not available within the borders of the country.
And that's the case with the Sentinel VPN though, since there is no single point to go after there is no single legal or private entity to go after there's a, as I said, 10s of 1000s VPN nodes online, each of these nodes are hosted by different people, different legal and private entities.
Basically, yeah, you can try banning some of them, but you will never succeed binding all of them. And there is no single server to, let's say, ban, or there's no single endpoint to block.
So application will remain functional, even if the government tries to prevent it from working, which already happening, for example, in Russia, Sentinel VPN based apps such as SolarVPN is already listed on the government banned list.
So they like trying to prevent people from using it. And despite the fact that this is happening, the application is still fully operational. And we see that a lot of people using it to get online to get access to some news, independent journalistic and etc.
So, yeah, that's what Sentinel is all about. We can we can talk that it's sort of online, a VPN nodes marketplace where people are able to, at first hand, offer their bandwidth for others to use offer their internet connection for others to use.
And on the other hand, they have users which are able to pay a fair price with the web 3.0 means of payments for VPN traffic.
Yeah, just just to jump in on that. I mean, Alex, from when you spoke on kind of centralized VPN to kind of hand over logs, how I kind of kind of became aware of this was kind of back in 2011.
So like, if anyone's familiar, there was in the United Kingdom and in America, there was something called lul sec, who are basically kind of a black cat kind of computer hacking group.
And they used a VPN to try and obviously hide a lot of their IP addresses. And that was called hide my ass. Well, hi, my ass. Sorry, because it's a because it's a donkey.
And they and they claimed that they never log and all of the things and what happened British intelligence and American intelligence services asked them to give over logs and they gave it over willingly.
So it just shows that kind of these companies don't they may promise one thing, but they definitely do log and it's it's time that we kind of move into a while where we have products that don't kind of lie to you and kind of provably don't log you.
I mean, a simple way to look at it for me with the central network and kind of what kind of got me involved in it.
It's for me, it's kind of like a sort of monetized version of the tour network where instead of taking donations from shady government agencies like tour does because it was developed.
It was developed by US Naval Intelligence for putting operatives into certain places to communicate, obviously, securely and obviously that's wound out more.
So instead of kind of taking donations, we're we're we're kind of incentivizing people to give their bandwidth. So it's kind of a very kind of capitalist model in that sense.
It's a case of you can earn money by kind of leasing your bandwidth, be that through a mixture of commercial IPs, residential IPs, which are going to be like that.
They're going to be like the big ones. And we're also working with kind of other projects within kind of three. So we're working with Handshake.
We use their resolvers. So that's kind of a DNS, decentralized alternative, Akash as well.
I mean, that's mass in cloud computing. You can host a certain type of node on Akash through Sentinel.
So there's lots of basically different kind of applications and kind of tactics that we can use that kind of traditional VPNs can't at all.
And that's hopefully where we're going to be kind of building in the next kind of year to go along with that.
Amazing. And I guess the next question is also a natural follow up. You guys touched upon this a little bit already, but I'd like to know a little bit more details.
Like for those listening, like why would I is really is it really the privacy element or is there other reasons why someone would choose a decentralized VPN like Sentinel over a centralized one?
Yeah, of course. I mean, let's let's move away from straight talking privacy.
Let's say you want to watch the American Netflix or library because their library is I mean, I'm from England and the UK Netflix library is three or four times smaller than the American one.
So I want to obviously watch films that are on the American one so you can connect to if you use a traditional VPN.
Netflix know that because they know the data centers of which the VPNs used to try and get it.
So they'll flag it and block you as opposed to kind of on the central network.
You can use a residential IP. And that's it's immediately so much more harder for Netflix to kind of understand how many people actually using it.
Because you're not going to get you simply can't have a thousand people like commercial data centers can on a single node with residential ones because I mean, have you ever been in a house with more than 10 people or streaming video?
It starts to slow down a bit. So that's why we've got a massive nodes that we want to create a lot more so more people can kind of come on.
So it's kind of boil that down. If you want to use a residential node to kind of get into watching Netflix, that's how how easy it is and other things like that, really.
So that's that's kind of more of a an application user side for VPN from from not so much a security privacy perspective.
That's that's where we're kind of going from from there.
I mean, why also why are the VPNs better than centralized VPNs? I mean, the web free space where we are.
I mean, half the VPNs don't even like touch upon crypto. I mean, web web free wallets, a lot of them, especially MetaMask have come out.
And say we actively log your IP. They're legally bound to do that, probably.
And they're coming out and just saying that we legally use VPN, use the VPN and stop.
Why? Why would you want people to start logging your transactions?
I know it's on the blockchain and people can do that anyway. But why let them you always I mean, the analogy comes up time and time again.
When you go and use the toilet or go and have a shower, you lock the door, don't you?
Because you don't you're not you're not blocking people from coming in.
You just don't want them to come in because privacy on that respect, you do need to respect it.
Awesome. And Alex, you have anything to add to that?
Well, as Salim said, pretty much everything I would like just to add on top that VPN on top on top of everything that was said,
gives an opportunity for those who are offering their their Internet connectivity to the network and basically offering their their devices,
their computers, their servers as the VPN nodes for for Sentinel.
They are able to get it monetized. And basically, for example, let's say you have a residential pretty good residential Internet connectivity.
Then you get unlimited bandwidth with your Internet service provider.
You might want to offer part of it to the Sentinel network and Sentinel basically will be able to pay off your bills for the Internet connectivity,
which is which is a good thing. And besides that, you can even earn some money on top,
which is not the case with the centralized VPN or Tor, which is not monetized at any form of way.
So, yeah, that's that's that's one of the benefits of the VPN as well.
Awesome. And I'd like to shift the focus now to the token DVPN.
Can you elaborate on some of the utility and specific use cases of the central coin?
You know, are there any staking rewards or how does that sort of add to or add value to the entire Sentinel DVPN ecosystem?
Not sure who wants to take this.
I'll take it, considering I'm on Sentinel.
I mean, so we're built on, as Alex said, we're built on Cosmos SDK.
So we are on Cosmos. So we're proof of stake.
Originally before when I first came in and kind of joined the Sentinel community, we're actually on Ethereum.
And I'm sure Alex will go into this.
There's a lot of kind of actual technical difficulties actually running our applications within Ethereum.
I mean, there's privacy concerns regarding kind of like how the nodes operate.
But in terms of kind of the DVPN coin, I mean, again, similar to other Cosmos projects.
Obviously, we've got our own valid data set.
That's been quite well. And people can stake their DVPN coin.
So one of the kind of incentives that we put around is all revenue from the network.
Twenty percent of that is taxed.
And that goes straight to stakers to kind of boost that kind of API.
Because obviously we're looking to kind of move to a kind of revenue based model.
Of course we are. We want to be around in the next 30 to 50 years type thing and have a functional network.
So if you're investing into the network, you get paid part of that.
So I mean, the standards as well with everything we've improved with stake.
When you state validators, you can participate in governance.
And obviously that validator set is essentially keeping the Sentinel blockchain going.
And obviously when you connect to a node or a server or you want to purchase a subscription,
all of that's kind of done automated and it's decentralized through the blockchain.
So as long as all those validators are up and keeping the chain going, in theory, the network doesn't go down.
And just to kind of one of the biggest fuds that kind of comes up again is people are saying,
oh, is my browsing history logged on the blockchain?
And again and again, we have to say, well, obviously not. No, it's not at all.
The only things that are kind of on the blockchain is transactions and parts of that.
So as Alex referred to earlier, none of those are tied to individual IDs or anything like that.
It's purely querying and on transactions for that. So that's where.
So we're a bit different.
So when you see metrics of blockchains saying, oh, we're doing X and X transactions a day,
obviously with the larger chains who are perhaps trading, they do a lot.
But our transactions aren't people sending each other the VPN.
I'm sure there is a certain amount of that.
But the predominant I'd say like ninety nine percent of the transactions on the central network are people connecting to nodes,
purchasing subscriptions and actually having a functional app in kind of like the real world, basically.
In terms of the key milestones or things that you guys have already achieved,
as well as what's ahead for you guys this year on your roadmap,
can you talk a little bit more about that or share any numbers that you can share?
I think it would be helpful for the listeners here.
Yeah, of course. So we've got a website stats.sentinel.co
and that kind of tracks kind of basic metrics of the network.
So I mean, right now we've got online.
We've got over twelve thousand nodes online today.
We've had nearly three thousand unique users and then we've got fifteen hundred people online at the moment.
I mean, nearly seven hundred gigabytes of data alone today and in total of unique users since since we began.
I mean, last year of unique users, we had just over ninety two thousand in twenty twenty three.
And currently in this year alone, we're at twenty eight thousand.
I'd need a bit more time as a communications leader, a bit more kind of length of kind of data sets to kind of really show the growth of the network.
But we've already done kind of almost a quarter of what we did last year within the first nineteen days of this year.
I would love to kind of see that keep keeping proving.
Look at our network revenue.
I mean, it's increasing and it's kind of it's progressing at quite a nice rate.
So in terms of one of the questions that I'll be meeting with Alex later is in terms of downloads.
And perhaps we can kind of veer into that kind of how many downloads does that kind of translate to Alex in terms of the apps that are getting pinged on the network.
Absolutely. So, yeah, this year we finally had over one hundred thousand downloads overall for our application.
And at the moment we have over one hundred and ten hundred and ten thousands of totally unique users on the chain.
These users, these people, which opened the app, the VPN app at least once during the last time and used the VPN connectivity within the application.
So we see that demand is rising there.
We have white labels that were launched recently.
For example, there is such an application called BAGMS, this VPN, which translates from Turkish language as independent VPN.
It is a VPN app built specifically for the Turkish market.
And it also uses our SDK and based on top of a Sentinel VPN.
And we see that it is becoming extremely popular in this region.
We see that there is one another web label is there about to launch, which is meant for Asian market, primarily for China.
It's called CautionVPN and the guys doing a really great job finalizing it there.
We see that there is our own application.
SolarVPN is quite popular in European countries and in North America, in a country such as Canada and the United States itself.
So, yeah, we see that there is the growth and the farther we go, the faster user base is growing.
As a matter of fact, just a couple of days ago, we had that much number of them both rising that some of our servers even had slight hiccup
in terms of load, so we had to scale it up.
So far, so good. We see that number of users is constantly growing as well as does with the number of VPN nodes available online.
Just yesterday, it was around 11,000 and today it's already 12,645 VPN nodes available online.
So this number is keep growing and overall, since we moved to the cosmos through whole Sentinel chain,
there is the over 200 terabytes of data was transferred, which is quite a lot if you take a look at that.
So, yeah, this is something that we're really proud of and we keep expanding there since we see that there is more and more white label applications are about to launch on top of the Sentinel.
As for now, as a matter of fact, for now, we're waiting for four more apps to be released next month.
And, yeah, we expect our user base to grow in this year, like in several times.
And, yeah, we are quite optimistic in that regard.
To kind of jump in on the end of Alex's point there, in terms of if you think about brands of VPN, like you've got your Nords, you've got your Expresses and you go down from there.
They're kind of cool. Let's call them Web 2 VPNs just to kind of differentiate them.
So they have their one single application with, say, millions of users all going through that one with Sentinel.
We're not just one VPN. We're a network where VPNs can kind of use and go from.
So the ones that obviously Alex is talking about getting released, their geographic VPNs and language-based VPNs, we're going to carry on doing that.
So we're going to have a Sentinel flagship VPN that's going to be coming out.
We did have one on Ethereum. We haven't had one on Cosmos, and it's time that we will be releasing one to kind of show the functionality of it.
If you think kind of going forward in terms of like you watch YouTube or Rumble or whichever kind of video site and people are always kind of asking you to kind of use their Express or Surfshark referral codes.
Now, one of the things that we'll be working on is you'll be able to, as an influencer, have your own VPN with your own branding, which is run essentially by us in the background, which will be communicated in a certain way.
So the goal really is to have thousands of VPNs, basically, and the people using them won't know they're actually using the Sentinel blockchain kind of based applications in a similar way when you're out and about or when you go to your friend's house.
Instead of the term of where's your toilet, it's what's your Wi-Fi password. You don't ask your friend what Wi-Fi ISP is he on, or if you do, it's quite a bit of a strange question.
But that's kind of where we're going, the idea of kind of vary a lot of market saturation with a lot of niche kind of outlooks on VPNs.
I think that's certainly going to be the future in terms of that. So to kind of end on that point, within web three is a specific example is a drops.
Now, a drops have been around for quite a long time, but there's obviously been shifting narratives in terms of how they're delivered.
So I think we are kind of entering what you could call a drop season, aren't we?
And a lot of these places and a lot of companies are again, there's been updated laws from mainly the SEC, who tell these companies, you have to exclude certain people.
For example, Americans can't participate in air drops. And these companies have to comply. I mean, unless they'll get a knock at the door type thing.
And it's the same even in England, where I am, there's certain financial products within the Cosmos ecosystem, like perp trades on different paths.
And it will be on other ones where I can't participate in that. Web two VPNs just aren't, they didn't even know that that's an even issue.
So we're capitalising on that. So one of them, we're working with a team who are developing quite, it's quite literally called AirDrop Unblock.
And it's solely targeted for people who want to claim air drops, who might otherwise be blocked.
So that's one of the ones that we're using, because one of the main kind of use cases that we got for, I think it was the Celestia AirDrop that really kind of took off.
Lots of people were saying that they were blocked. So we're in that business. Use these VPNs here, use our DVPNs, use residential nodes get on.
And we've had positive feedback. It's great to see that people can have access to these services because we're providing them a kind of real life kind of application to use.
So, yeah, that's there's lots of things planned in terms of actual applications that kind of come out.
And that's what we'll be sharing with my role is basically to be sharing all of those and kind of the kind of the kind of granular kind of details on each one.
Awesome. So we talked a lot about privacy and obviously that's sort of the main the main value of a lot of these VPN or decentralized VPNs.
But I'd also like to highlight security a little bit more. How are you guys thinking about security, especially, you know, is it from a decentralized product standpoint?
Can you share a little bit more about that?
Yeah, sure. So there is several aspects in terms of security that we care about and we took to care about basically.
So, first of all, the security of the chain itself, thanks for customers as the cases were based in it.
Our blockchain is in blockchain integrity is basically protected by proof of stake model.
So we ensure security of the of the network itself by using the polar validators, which is validating networks on the constant basis.
And there is the there is a true decentralization there as we see that there is a different organizations and different people are running their own validators on top of the Sentinel to ensure integrity and safety of the network itself.
This is what is regarding network itself. And if we talk about the VPN applications for end users, there is a certain ways that we there is a certain things that we do in order to protect people while being online.
First of all, all of the Internet connections are being protected with the advanced military-grade encryption protocols.
And we're using such VPN protocols such as WireGuard or one of the VPN protocols, which is not that popular one, but quite efficient in terms of combating online censorship.
And staying undetected is a V2-ray protocol, which can basically, for Internet service provider, it may look like some different Internet activity.
And if we're talking about like standard VPN protocols, which are being used by other VPN companies such as OpenVPN or L2TP or IPSec.
These VPN protocols are not concealing the fact that you're actually using VPN. So your Internet service provider can tell that you are using VPN.
And that's not the case with the V2-ray protocol, which we are using as one of the protocols on the Sentinel VPN, because V2-ray actually not only protects your traffic, but also hides the fact that you're using VPN itself.
So that also might be useful in certain regions. For example, if we're talking about certain Arabic countries, Middle East.
In many countries out there, there is not only ban for VPN services, but there is also quite severe punishments for citizens using the VPN services.
And obviously, if you travel there, you don't want to encounter any problems, any things with local law enforcement agencies, because you're using VPN services to access your favorite apps and web services, as you used to do at home country.
And V2-ray protocol is the best way to go there, because it does conceal the fact that you're using VPN, and there is no possible way for Internet service providers to actually have any clue that you're connected to the VPN service.
That's regarding the safety on the user's side. We have quite more upcoming in this year.
For example, since we would like to give even more protection to our customers, to users of the Sentinel VPN, we currently are developing a multi-hop system which will allow you not to use just one VPN node,
but several as the chain of connection. If you're living in New York, and you would like to get connected to the Internet using Accident Point in Japan, you can use the one node in the middle of this path somewhere in, let's say, Amsterdam, Netherlands or Berlin, Germany, whatever.
And that will ensure additional protection of your traffic as it goes through multiple endpoints.
Besides that, we have support for decentralized DNS service called Handshake DNS, which is, first of all, quite popular.
And at the second hand, we are using that to ensure users' privacy in terms of DNS service, because many public DNS services out there, for example, we talk about Google ones, we can pretty much tell if they're not collecting any data or do they?
We have no clue of what's going on under the hood there. And with Handshake DNS, since it's a fully distant, licensed and open source DNS resolving system, we're offering that one in our applications as well for people to use.
What else I can tell there? Yeah, in terms of security of the identity of the person that is using DPM, as I said, everything that you do on the Sentinel blockchain is not linked to your identity anyhow.
And you hide your identity behind the web 3.0 wallet, which is which is way safer than paying with your credit card, which has your name on it, or paying with the PayPal or other web 2.0 means of payments that instantly gives idea about who you are to send less VPN services.
So, yeah, that's what we do in terms of security. It's not everything, but like overall, just to have quick understanding of what measures are being taken there. It is what we have.
Yeah, part of my kind of output for comms coming into 2024 is to really look to educate people on online security. So many times people are getting scammed and clicking on false links.
I don't see many kind of people talking about operational security and just basic things. Now, a DVPN isn't the be and end of security, and the reason why I say that is it's a tool for you to use and have to stay as secure as you can online.
So that's where we want to go. We've got kind of a community kind of down there where we're going to kind of implement a lot more kind of tutorials and kind of talks within individual privacy and security.
Now, like, get people talking, like, how many people do you know who have no idea about it? That's who we want to kind of target. That's the kind of next step.
Well, simultaneously, really honing in on that Web3 kind of everyone here. So we're obviously all into crypto here in Web3, like really kind of honing in on the aspect of kind of Web3 wallet protections on that side.
So a lot of education is what we're looking to plan to really kind of come more of a kind of like a learning hub and a security suite in that kind of sense.
All right. And in terms of, you know, the the the open source nature of your code, can you talk a little bit more about that? How does this transparency contribute to, you know, the platform's reliability as well as community community engagement?
Yeah, sure. So if we talk about Sentinel itself, Sentinel has everything open source, and that gives us actually quite a lot of benefits.
First of all, we have a quite large community with several thousands of people which are able to not only review our code, but also give us additional feedback, suggestions, which which Sentinel team uses to improve the product itself, the chain itself, and it's always been taken care of.
Been taken into consideration. And yeah, we see that actually product evolved during last year and a half significantly only because of the public feedback that were given for the code that was out there open source on the GitHub.
And since everything is open source, any company which is willing to build their own DVP and application is able just to fork it from the existing repositories on Sentinel's GitHub and have it as the groundwork for their own application.
If we talk about other companies which are building on top of Sentinel, not Sentinel itself, for example, Soul Lapse, we also try to release open source as much things as possible for the community.
Not only because it is beneficial for us, we basically have plenty of people looking in our code and telling us what we can improve there.
But as well as as we see others reusing our code, we see that the network grows along with it, which gives us more benefits out of it as well.
Everything that we currently have built for Sentinel DVP and mostly open source Sentinel DVP apps are open source as well, which also plays the crucial part in terms of user security.
Because if we talk, let's say, about centralized VPN applications such as, I don't know, NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Private Internet Access and many others, you may wonder, but none of them actually open source, so you have zero idea of what's going on there under the hood.
And I bet there is a reason why they don't want to open source that.
And that reason is not because they're protecting their intellectual property, it has nothing to do with that.
It's probably because there might be some shady stuff going on out there, to be honest.
And if you talk about applications built on top of Sentinel, they are open source so you can ensure that there is no malicious code being run on your device.
That you can always make sure of integrity, ensure integrity of the applications.
And you can check yourself that everything that is claimed to be happening there is actually there and there is nothing else, which is great because most of the VPN providers, they request you to trust them.
And our idea in the Sentinel is to go with a zero trust model where you don't have to trust anything, you can check everything yourself and basically make sure that there is no malicious intentions, malicious code embedded into the applications that you're using.
And Alex, I'd like to give you, before we wrap things up here, I'd like to also give you a chance to talk a little bit more about Solar Labs.
Can you just perhaps double click on the contributions of Solar Labs in the development and evolution of the Sentinel network?
And the role of Solar Labs in the ecosystem?
Yeah, totally. So Solar Labs came to the Sentinel in the beginning of 2021 as a company which is willing to build applications on top of the Sentinel blockchain.
Back in 2021, I learned about Sentinel blockchain myself and I was invited there to help guys from Sentinel build applications as we had pretty much a lot of experience building VPN apps than my previous company.
So we would like to take that experience and leverage it for good of the Sentinel.
So since 2021, Sentinel was building its own VPN applications and became not only the vendor building of Sentinel, but also became a core contributor to Sentinel itself.
As we helped Sentinel team to develop the chain, we helped Sentinel team to develop the tools and instruments for other companies which will help them to build their own applications easily on top of a Sentinel blockchain.
And so far we even launched our own, we can call it, white label program, which is offering other companies to spin up their own applications on top of a Sentinel.
We even offering in-house development, key turn development for these applications for other companies as well, as we are quite a large team here based in Estonia.
And yeah, so far we launched our own applications for all the platforms. It's mobiles and desktops, as well as we helped developing many of the applications for other companies out there, which are basically using Sentinel as well, the same way as we do.
We also do some part, not in terms of development, but about spreading the word about Sentinel. We did quite a great job there.
Me, myself, I used to be a human rights, digital human rights activist in Russia and worked closely with Alexei Navalny's team at some certain point of time as a prominent opposition politician in Russia.
And because of that, got pretty good media coverage worldwide. And we, frankly, we used that one to spread the word about Sentinel, make more people know about that.
And yes, so far we scaled Sentinel network several times since we joined our forces there. At this moment, we also provide our own validator on top of a Sentinel, so we're validating the chain.
And yeah, we pretty much treat each other with the Sentinel team as one big, let's say, GVPN family developing all of that stuff altogether and communicating on a daily basis that we can ensure that we do our best from both sides to give Sentinel what it needs
and to look at the evolution of the network together and bring our all efforts to make it the best way to stay online securely and safely.
All right. And I want to ask you the last question, which is just more about resources and learning more about the project.
Where can, for those interested in learning more about Sentinel, where can they find out more about you guys? And then lastly, for both of you guys, just any final announcements or anything you'd like to share before we wrap up the spaces?
Yeah, of course. Yeah, great question. So, best place for a kind of high level kind of easily digestible deed is Twitter. Come and see what we're doing. We're diving into lots of stuff.
If that tickles your fancy, then come on to our website. It's up on our link tree in our bio, and that will lead you down the rabbit hole.
So, kind of within Sentinel and get to kind of taking more. It's always nice. I always have stats.sentinel.co up just to kind of see network metrics. It's nice.
As a comms guy, I love numbers, and I love metrics. I love seeing increase, and it's brilliant to talk about that kind of stuff. So, yeah, come on to our Twitter.
If you get that far, come into our Telegram as well. That's always a good laugh. Quite vocal on there, and there's lots of people coming in. So, yeah, that's Twitter and Telegram and our main website at the best places, yeah.
Amazing. And Alex, what about you?
Well, you can follow us here on Twitter. Basically, I'm posting about everything on my personal Twitter account, and we're also running Telegram, so you can follow us there.
It's a solar DVPN without any space bars or underscores. In Telegram, we have a channel there, which we use to post information about upcoming releases and more.
So, yeah, basically, on Twitter, or now we call it X, right? You can follow us both with the Sentinel team there and have pretty much a good overview of what's happening with the Sentinel blockchain and the products that we built on top of it.
Awesome. I'd like to thank both of you guys again for joining us today, and I hope everyone listening, you guys have learned something, and now you know a lot more about both Sentinel as well as Solar Labs.
And I hope you guys can join us again in the near future to give us some updates. So, much appreciated, and I hope you guys have a great weekend.
Thanks, Tim, and thank you.