• Sentinel's dVPN network saw astronomical levels of adoption over the course of 2024, topped off by a record-setting uptick over the recently-concluded holiday season.
• During 2024, the network of dVPN applications serving these users ballooned from four to more than nine.
• Sentinel's dVPN userbase has more than quintupled within the past twelve months.
• Over half a million people worldwide have used a Sentinel-powered dVPN at least once.
• The amount of data consumed on the network has reached an industrial scale—over two petabytes just within the past twelve months.
• The Sentinel blockchain is now consistently near the top of the Cosmos Ecosystem in total daily active wallets.
• The Sentinel Coin (DVPN) had a stable year after making a dramatic exit from the bear market cellar in 2023.
• Six governance proposals were passed during 2024.
For more details, continue to the full article below.
Introduction
If you're a cryptocurrency or blockchain enthusiast, chances are very high that you've heard plenty of commentary from family and friends about a perceived lack of utility for the technology.
This is a very valid critique. As Breadcrumbs dVPN lead developer and CEO Zac Wickstrom put it during the closing panel of Cosmoverse in October:
"At some point, we [the blockchain industry] gotta be born... We need to take all this incredible work that we've done to build tools for builders, and reach the end of the food chain where we're building something for consumers."
Blockchain has given the world lightning-fast methods for financial transactions, a hedge against inflation, and a path towards giving the digital world permanence.
But where are the products? Why isn't this revolutionary (and quite old) technology part of daily life for your friends and family? After all, the Web 2.0 phenomenon in the late-aughts was embraced by mainstream society within the space of a few short years.
After Sentinel's phenomenal year (and the broader successes of the DePIN movement), you now have something to point to.
In the almost sixteen years since Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper, almost no blockchain-based consumer product has achieved the level of mainstream adoption and acceptance that dVPN has. The bulk of that progress occurred in 2024.
Let's allow the statistics to speak for themselves...
The dVPN Network
dVPN Applications
On January 1st, 2024 there were only four fully-launched consumer dVPN applications powered by (or integrated with) Sentinel: Meile dVPN, Independent dVPN (then known as Bağımsız dVPN), SOLAR dVPN, and Decentr's Web3 browser.
L-R: Sentinel Shield, dVPN by NORSE, and Breadcrumbs dVPN.
Exactly one year later, that count is now at nine—and even more than that if one includes products which are still in their beta testing phase.
Many of those applications already have thousands of downloads and users. For example, Meile dVPN downloads are well into the tens of thousands; and Independent dVPN surpassed the head-spinning 100,000 download mark before the year was even halfway through.
Left: Meile dVPN for Windows. Right: Independent dVPN for Android.
As we'll see in the next two sections, a thriving application ecosystem means a thriving blockchain.
Sentinel Docs maintains a directory of dVPN applications which spans every major platform.
Daily Active Users (DAU)
The Sentinel blockchain oscillated within the top ten for daily active users (DAU) among Cosmos Ecosystem projects for much of the year. The DAU metric is a measure of how many unique wallet addresses on a blockchain have initiated a transaction within the preceding twenty-four hours.
Sentinel's performance in the category often outdid projects with far larger market caps such as Osmosis and the Cosmos Hub itself. By the end of the year, Sentinel was a mainstay within the top five—and by December, it was even leading the pack on some days.
Source: Map of Zones
Holiday Cheer
Alongside net blockchain activity, Sentinel's dVPN network specifically has seen a substantial increase in its daily unique user counts. This upswing began in the final weeks of 2023, plateaued during the middle of 2024, then began rocketing upwards again in late autumn.
The dVPN network then experienced an absolute explosion in activity over the Christmas holiday, leading to an unprecedented three consecutive days of all-time highs in users.
During the final week of 2022, the network had 419 users. In the same week at the end of 2023, the network had 13,384 users. Last week, the dVPN network had an astonishing all-time record 31,624 users.
The all-time high for unique dVPN users within a twenty-four hour period was set several times over the course of the year. The July 23rd total of 11,025 stood as the record for several months. It was expected that this record would eventually be surpassed, but absolutely nobody anticipated that it would happen three times in the span of three days.
This came to pass during the holidays—Christmas Eve through Boxing Day 2024 wound up being the three most successful days in the history of the network. The network continued to pull five-digit totals in the days that followed.
| Date | Users |
|---|---|
| 2024-12-24 | 11,543 |
| 2024-12-25 | 11,678 |
| 2024-12-26 | 12,448 |
Because of this Christmas dVPN frenzy, Sentinel dVPN now appears positioned to enter 2025 with a paradigm-changing level of momentum which could completely surpass the expectations of even the project's most optimistic supporters.
stats.sentinel.co
All-Time Users
Nothing excites the community quite like milestones in the all-time dVPN users department. 2024 contained a litany of thrilling milestones from that metric, the most prominent of which was the 500,000 mark in early September. As of January 1st, 2025 that count stands at almost 650,000—meaning it is safe to say that well over half a million people across the globe have used a dVPN at least once.
To provide context for the speed of this increase: The 100,000 user milestone was passed in January 2024. That means Sentinel dVPN more than quintupled its userbase in the space of only eight months.
It should be noted that data for the dVPN network only goes back to 2021 (not 2018, the year the dVPN network first went live). This is because Sentinel transitioned to its current mainnet Cosmos-based blockchain in March of that year.
Data Consumption
Sentinel's dVPN network has now consumed over two petabytes (PB) of data since mainnet was launched in 2021. The overwhelming majority of that data was consumed in 2024.
A petabyte of data is equivalent to 1,024 terabytes, or about one million gigabytes. It represents a truly immense amount of digital information—to the point where “petabyte” is rarely even used as an everyday term. It’s most often used to describe the storage capacity of large data centers, or the volume of data processed by major internet services and cloud providers.
In contrast: Before 2024, monthly data consumption on the dVPN network could have fit onto a run-of-the-mill portable hard drive from any electronics store or retailer.
During the final month of 2024, over 250TB of data consumed used by users on the Sentinel. Here is how that compares to December of previous years:
| Year | Data |
|---|---|
| Dec. 2022 | 2.79 TB |
| Dec. 2023 | 73.58 TB |
| Dec. 2024 | 253.79 TB |
Node Network
The dVPN Node Network was probably the only aspect of the Sentinel Ecosystem which shrank over the past twelve months. In March the Sentinel Foundation instituted limits on node subnets (in essence, a collection of nodes which share a single IP address range)—sacrificing superficial gains in node quantity to improve censorship resilience and stability.
As of the writing of this article, Sentinel’s dVPN network has 3,835 active nodes. While this has been a major reduction compared to the 15,808 which were active in December 2023, there are still far more options for connections (with more geographic range) on Sentinel than any centralized VPN provider currently offers consumers.
nodes.sentinel.co
If you want to host a node and become a backend contributor to the project, Sentinel Docs hosts a variety of helpful and concise guides.
docs.sentinel.co/nodes
The Sentinel Coin (DVPN)
docs.sentinel.co/dvpn-coin
Late 2024 saw the Sentinel Foundation propose a change of the Sentinel Coin's ticker moniker from DVPN to one which reflects the blockchain's diverse usecases and bandwidth bazaar DePIN narrative. One such suggestion was P2P (peer-to-peer).
The idea has been passionately debated among the community and core contributors, and will certainly remain a hot topic during the first quarter of 2025.
Coin Price
Setting aside nomenclature, DVPN as an asset showed healthy stability throughout the year after a bombastic 2023 in which price triumphantly emerged from the chilly bear market cellar and tokenomics were significantly altered.
Technically the Sentinel Coin has shed approximately 60% of its value since January 1st, 2024; but this doesn't quite convey the whole picture. DVPN experienced a hefty series of speculative pumps during the 2023 holiday season, which has skewed the one-year price chart. If the data range is expanded to November 2023, DVPN has actually doubled in value over the past year.
Though the coin's performance has still been impressive, 2024's growth was primarily in user adoption and network metrics. Coinholders are eager to see their investments catch up with project's commercial success in the new year; which looks to be a huge one for the asset, due to the start of marketing, further inflation reduction measures, and exchange listings.
Staking
The staking ratio of DVPN is an enviable 67.70%. That means that well over half of the coin's entire circulating supply is tied up in staking and therefore off the market. There are 20.53 billion total Sentinel Coins staked as of January 1st, 2025; an increase of 8.25% over the preceding twelve months.
Over 17,000 wallets are staking DVPN, generating approximately $3 million USD worth of staking rewards per year.
Source: StakingRewards.com
Inflation
In the wake of multiple successful inflation reduction efforts during 2023, the Sentinel Coin's inflation rate has mostly remained stagnant this year, but did see a marginal decrease of 0.27%. The coin will likely see another inflation cut via governance in the near future, according to core contributors.
On the subject of governance...
Governance
Six governance proposals were introduced during the calendar year. The bulk of these proposals were submitted by the Sentinel Growth DAO, which required community funds for its various initiatives, ranging from application development to bringing Sentinel back to Cosmoverse.
Proposals in 2024
- ✅ Proposal 48 (passed 2024-01-25) - The DAO requested funds for an advertising campaign and development of Sentinel's native blockchain explorer.
- ✅ Proposal 49 (passed 2024-04-04) - The DAO requested community funding for Cosmoverse, application development, and bringing dVPN Node software to Raspberry Pi devices (which would later become the Casanode suite).
- ✅ Proposal 51 (passed 2024-05-20) - Notional Labs introduced a proposal to reduce the chain's maximum block size in order to reduce spam.
- ✅ Proposal 52 (passed 2024-05-24) - A companion proposal to #51, which increased the cost of bytes to reduce the potential impact of spam.
- ✅ Proposal 53 (passed 2024-07-13) - MedasDigital's proposal to update the expired tendermint-58 IBC Client.
- ✅ Proposal 54 (passed 2024-10-19) - In the year's final governance proposal, the DAO requested an additional round of funding for marketing, grant programs, continued application development, and non-English advertising campaigns.
Note: Proposal 50 was a spam proposal which never received a deposit.
More Year in Review Coverage
This is the third installment of our special five-part series of articles wrapping up 2024.
Our first 2024 year in review article, Sentinel in the Media, was published last month. It contains every media appearance (interviews, panel discussions, speeches, and more) that important figures within the project have made over the past twelve months.
The second article in the series, A Timeline of Sentinel in 2024, provides dozens of accessible bite-size highlights from across the ecosystem during the course this monumental year.
The final two upcoming articles in the series will be a collection of our best stories from this year, topped off by a massive preview of what we might be seeing from Sentinel in 2025. Stay tuned!
At dVPN News, every member of the Sentinel community is a contributor. Whether you're writing articles, sharing tutorials, or participating in discussions, your involvement is what drives our collective growth, and best of all it's rewarded! Together, so if you to contribute to the growth of the Sentinel Network, you are in the right place!
Connect With Us
Stay in touch and be part of our growing community:
• Follow Sentinel on X.
• Follow the Growth DAO on X.
• Join the Growth DAO community Telegram Group.
• Join the official Sentinel Subreddit, r/dVPN.
