Flagship, Marketing, and Cosmoverse: Team Shares Ecosystem Update for April

Team veteran ProjectAutonomy posted a flurry of messages to the main Sentinel Telegram group yesterday to update the community on many aspects of the project. In this article, we'll attempt to both summarize and expand upon the key points for you.

Our summary of a similar ecosystem update made at the end of February can be read at the link below.

Application News

Sentinel dVPN Client

Work continues on user experience (UX) improvements for the new Sentinel dVPN flagship application, which has entered its official launch. The revived flagship was submitted to the Google Play Store this past Wednesday, after over a year of development and over a month of intense public beta testing.

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Android users who don't want to wait for the launch version of the Sentinel dVPN to arrive on the Play Store can directly download an APK file using this link.

The UX enhancements will include a "recent nodes" list, a preview of which can be viewed below. The list is being added as a result of feedback from beta testers. The Sentinel team has been on a "quest towards perfection, and adding in as many of the feedback points as possible," ProjectAutonomy said. He also expressed gratitude to participants in the app's aforementioned long public beta.

A preview of the upcoming "recent nodes" list posted by the Sentinel team member.

Independent dVPN

Third-party whitelabel Independent dVPN (formerly Bağımsız VPN) was singled out for a special congratulations. The Turkish whitelabel app was released for Android and iOS in Autumn of 2023, and has already surpassed 100k total downloads across all platforms. It has also garnered a 4.5 rating from users on the Google Play Store.

We hope the age rating does not disappoint any readers who were planning to introduce their newborn to the app.

Independent dVPN was planned as a regional whitelabel with an narrow Turkish focus, so its incredible global success since launch appears to have been a welcome surprise to Sentinel insiders. The decision to rebrand from Bağımsız VPN to Independent dVPN (still a work in progress) shows that even the app's team may not have anticipated its international appeal.

Marketing

Advertising and Press

User incentivization and "heavy paid marketing campaigns" will indeed commence with the flagship launch, an objective first announced by the team in June of last year. "With the flagship application working smoothly and looking beautiful, we are going to go all-out to bring more users and stakeholders into the network," ProjectAutonomy said.

Sentinel Growth DAO founder Seventh later responded to a community member's request for further details on the project's marketing strategy. He described it as multifaceted, and elaborated that it will focus on advertising and attracting coverage by wires and other news outlets. "Wires" are news agencies that provide syndicated articles to subscribed press outlets, the most famous of which would be the Associated Press and Reuters. Sentinel will also reach out to key thought leaders, both in the Cosmos Ecosystem and beyond.

To preemptively answer the question of why marketing did not commence until the present, ProjectAutonomy explained that initiating a massive marketing campaign while the ecosystem's application offerings were solely third-party would have confused people as to what Sentinel actually is.

"For the first time in over three years, the public will be able to easily understand what Sentinel is [because of the flagship]", the veteran Sentinel team member explained. "We've been very quiet, because all effort was on building," Seventh of the Growth DAO added.

Cosmoverse 2024

It was announced that Sentinel will also be a sponsor of the Cosmoverse 2024 convention in Dubai, which will take place from October 21–23. This would represent an assertive amplification of Sentinel's presence in the social and cultural fabric of the Cosmos Ecosystem, which the team has openly lamented a perceived withdrawal from since 2021.

For more information on Cosmoverse, including tickets, see their official website linked below.

In concurrent news, Sentinel Proposal 49, a routine request for community pool funds by the Sentinel Growth DAO, was passed on Thursday. The proposal text stipulated that a portion of the new funds will be used for promoting the project at Cosmoverse.

Other News

All-Time High

On Tuesday (April 2nd) Sentinel saw over 48,000 unique sessions in a twenty-four hour period, which set yet another all-time record in that category. It can't be expected to last long—it's already been broken countless times already so far this year!

A screenshot of the milestone shared by the official Sentinel channels.

Chain Upgrade

ProjectAutonomy returned to the group later to share that Sentinel's next objective in the development realm is another major upgrade to its blockchain.

The last upgrade of this sort (greenlit by Proposal 30) went online in August of last year, and introduced now-staple features such as time-based subscriptions to nodes, hourly payouts for node operators, dedicated IP functions, and configurable on-chain subscription plans, among others.

The only confirmed feature we are aware of at present for the next upgrade is a reduction in the Sentinel blockchain's block time from five seconds to three. The team believes that this will reduce connection/disconnection times for users of all ecosystem applications.

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