The Sentinel team announced in November that the project's official website would be receiving a complete overhaul. Almost a year later, ​the work is now nearly complete.

The new website will be far more than just a simple face-lift for Sentinel or a valuable educational resource for curious newcomers. It will serve as a polished, cohesive central access point for downloads, information, and resources the likes of which the community has never had previously in Sentinel's eight years of development.

Background

The current Sentinel website (the second since the project began in 2017) went live in February of 2023. The overhaul succeeded in refreshing the project's outward public image while also expunging outdated information and introducing entirely new utilities such as the stats dashboard and node explorer. However, two years is a very long time in the fast-paced Web3 world, and the project has experienced a massive expansion in both adoption and scope during that time.

The current website portrays Sentinel solely as an open source dVPN architecture and does not convey the full spectrum of potential offered by the project's blockchain and node network. That issue has been exacerbated by both the sheer number of dVPNs in the ecosystem (over eight as of this article's publication) and the ongoing rollout of the Sentinel Scout AI data layer.

On top of that, Sentinel and its constituent dVPNs have experienced an astonishing uptick in consumer interest since 2023. When the current website launched, daily dVPN network traffic was often below one hundred unique users. Nowadays, daily traffic is in the 10,000 range or higher, and the all-time user count has surpassed one million.

All of these factors and more made a new, enterprise-grade website an absolute necessity going forward. In the section below, we'll share a preview of the Sentinel Ecosystem's new online nexus and go into more depth about the improvements and new features it will offer.

First and foremost, the new website's aesthetics will be a profound step forward compared to what's currently on offer. Previews shared by the team reveal a sleek new homepage that aligns neatly with the latest industry web design trends while remaining rooted to Sentinel's well-established aesthetic fundamentals.

The new interface features updated branding, a lighter color scheme, transparent elements, new typefaces, and video backdrops. The home page also proudly displays Sentinel's impressive array of partnerships—something which was absent from the 2023 iteration of the website.

"The basic wireframe structure of the first page of Sentinel's new website will clearly define Sentinel as a decentralized P2P bandwidth marketplace and infrastructure for data and privacy usecases," a team member explained in a December tweet.

Longtime Sentinel partners Akash Network, who also offer a unified dashboard for their varied DePIN services, have been cited as a major influence on the overall flow and layout of the site.

Use, Monetize, Build

From a functionality standpoint, the three major objectives appear to be:

• One-stop access to the myriad of dVPN applications powered by Sentinel, categorized by user need and platform of choice.
• Integration of Sentinel Scout and its frontend customer dashboard into the main website (instead of a separate web app isolated to a subdomain).
• Consolidation of the website's various stats dashboards, maps, and other miscellaneous utilities and resources.

To create a concise and beginner-friendly onboarding process for visitors, all processes and user flows have been arranged into three simple categories: Use, Monetize, and Build. Last November, a team member described the rudiments of how this unified three-pronged interface will work to the community:

"On the homepage, as the user enters the first section, [there] will be two call-to-actions side by side. In one section the user can select the device and dVPN services they want, and they'll be recommended a dVPN application," he explained. "In the other section, a user can enter a request for scraping data that will then point them towards Sentinel Scout."

The dVPN download portal will provide instant access to any of the network's applications, including third-party ones. The form next to it will allow visitors to place AI data scraping orders with Sentinel's bandwidth providers using Scout.

One additional detail which will be a delight to Android users, especially those who prefer not to use or cannot access the Google Play Store, is that the new Sentinel website will offer direct in-browser APK downloads for all dVPN apps with Android versions.

Complementary to the dVPN download and Scout data work order boxes within the "Use" category, the unified interface will also feature a section for bandwidth providers ("Monetize"), which will provide them with the files and guidance they need to host a dVPN Node or Scout data miner; and a section for developers ("Build"), which will connect them with development kits and documentation.

The website's launch, expected some time within the next few months (maybe as soon as this autumn), will be accompanied by the release of a fresh whitepaper to replace the now-outdated version published in 2021 as well as the first formal documentation for Sentinel Scout.

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What is Sentinel?

Sentinel is a peer-to-peer global bandwidth marketplace which powers both privacy-focused consumer products and development utilities. The most prominent of these usecases at present are decentralised VPN (dVPN) applications and data acquisition for the training of AI models.

🎓 To learn more about Sentinel, check out more of our articles, visit the project's official website, or read the documentation.

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