Sentinel at Cosmoverse 2025 in Review
Watch CEO Aleksandr Litreev's keynote address and Valt's prize-winning pitch in Split.
At the tail end of a landmark year in which the project saw a rebrand, website revamp, milestone chain upgrade, and slate of new releases, Sentinel just made a big impression at the Cosmos Ecosystem's marquee annual event.
Cosmoverse 2025 took place between October 30 and 1 November in the Adriatic seaside city of Split, Croatia. This was the third time that Sentinel has attended the conference, which has been held every autumn since 2021.
For more background on both Cosmoverse and Sentinel's history of participation, see the preview article we published last Wednesday.
P2P Newswire
Aleksandr Litreev
Sentinel & NORSE Labs CEO"People who really care about blockchain should care about mass adoption and availability of products to everyone."
Aleksandr Litreev made his Cosmoverse debut this year. He is an Estonian developer and cybersecurity specialist who was appointed as Sentinel's first CEO in April after playing a key role in development for years. His other company, NORSE Labs, has been responsible for the bulk of Sentinel's consumer adoption in the dVPN realm.
His background as a prominent anti-government activist in his birth country of Russia during the latter half of the 2010s created visa issues which prevented him from attending last year's conference in Dubai.
In his keynote address on the main stage during the final day of the conference, he quickly made up for lost time with a pragmatic thirteen-minute presentation about Sentinel's "blockchain for the billions" ethos, titled Sentinel P2P: Blockchain Complexity to Mass Adoption.
Video courtesy of Cosmoverse and NORSE Labs.
In the presentation, Litreev highlighted Sentinel's recent adoption successes and the intuitive, user-friendly nature of its products—which provide an experience that is virtually indistinguishable from traditional VPNs. Sentinel's dVPN network, which recently surpassed one million all-time unique users, has demonstrated an unparalleled ability to reach blockchain-agnostic consumers unfamiliar with crypto.
He also touched upon Sentinel's wide range of supported platforms, which include everything from mobile and desktop devices to smart televisions; and the network's proven track record of censorship resilience, even in regions subject to the most stringent digital rights restriction like China and Russia.
Shortly after the keynote, the Sentinel CEO joined Alex Zaidelson of Secret Network for a panel discussion about privacy.
Anonymous Contributor
Our profile of Aleksandr Litreev and NORSE Labs published in March before he was appointed CEO of Sentinel.
Zac Wickstrom
Valt Data CEO"We are addressing the biggest problem of the information age; and that is that everybody controls your information except you."
U.S.-based Valt, whose groundbreaking personal data manager/dVPN app is built on Sentinel, has become a key player in the ecosystem over the past year.
The company's founder and CEO, Silicon Valley veteran Zac Wickstrom, was Sentinel's main representative at Cosmoverse 2024, where he participated in several panels and pitched his app on the main stage in front of thousands of attendees and online viewers as the event drew to a close.
After ultimately finishing second in last year's pitch competition, Wickstrom returned to Cosmoverse this year to finish what he started in Dubai. In this, he succeeded: After delivering a concise yet compelling three-minute long presentation on his app before judges, Zac Wickstrom and Valt were declared the winners of the Cosmoverse 2025 pitch competition.
[Credit: Seventh/Sentinel Growth DAO]
This victory caps off a very successful twelve month period period for Valt, who began quietly building their product under its original moniker of Breadcrumbs in late 2022 before finally launching and kicking off a publicity campaign last year.
In the interval between Cosmoverse 2024 and 2025, Wickstrom returned to Dubai for TOKEN2049 in May, where he also claimed first place in a pitch competition. Valt has also expanded its range of supported platforms to include every major mobile and desktop operating system.
Anonymous Contributor
Our profile of Zac Wickstrom and Valt Data from March.
Related
P2P Newswire
Our special article series covering last year's conference.
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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.
