The Unofficial DVPN Bagholder’s Hopium Dispensary

Buyers, stakers, and holders of the DVPN token have had a rough few months. This is a light-hearted attempt by Sentinel Independent News to provide them with some respite from the depressing hellscape landscape that they’ve found themselves in.

A quick disclaimer first: The goal with this piece is not impartiality or objectivity, but rather to provide a service to our community in the only way we can — writing. This shouldn’t be considered part of our regular news coverage, but rather an editorial piece.

Special thanks to the various community members that we’ve borrowed information from to create this; and also to everyone still sticking by our beloved project through thick and thin.

1. Price does not go up forever, nor does it go down forever. “We’re going to zero” and similar mantras are just a meme, and sometimes trends seem like they’ll never change — until they do. For Sentinel holders, the bull run of early to late 2021 felt like it came out of nowhere. DVPN price (well, back then it was SENT price) languished in a stasis zone of $0.0005 to $0.001 for month after month after month. Back in those days, between project genesis in 2018 and the excitement of 2021, we were all just speculators who had no idea if the price would ever pick up. There was an optimism that eventually Sentinel might go on a moon mission, but in the end we were still completely ignorant of what the future might hold for us. Then all of a sudden, in late 2020, there were rumbles. Not so long after that, things began getting crazy. If you were there for the onset of last bull run, maybe you remember how exciting and shocking it was. If you’re newer to the project, just keep in mind that we’ve been in these seemingly endless price doldrums before — when they end, you will probably not be remotely prepared for it or expecting it, and it will be amazing. Unlike during the OG era of Sentinel trading in 2018–2021, at least we know for certain the heights that we can climb to.
2. We did it once with one app, so we’ll have no problem doing it again with two or more better ones. Sentinel was represented by only one, barely functional app during the bull run of 2021, and still managed to hit its ATH of $0.05. From a user’s perspective, Sentinel is far better now than it ever has been before, as Solar dVPN, Meile dVPN, and Decentr have provided us with a much better front-end. The market isn’t always logical, but if it is in this case, we should surpass ATH during the next bull market.
3. DVPN has a small market cap. Rank #845 at time of writing. With such low levels of buying and selling activity, all it would take to jump-start positive price movement is a few thousand dollars worth of new investments coming in every day. We saw proof of this in May — a single medium buy order of a couple hundred thousand dollars caused an instantaneous 35% increase. As it was only one buyer, price drifted downwards again over the succeeding couple of days to previous levels; but it’s concrete proof that once even moderate buy activity for the token begins again (and is sustained), price can turn around very fast. That’s the joy of lowcap tokens.
4. There is still very little competition in the dVPN space. Yes, we do have “competitors” like Orchid, Mysterium, or Boring Protocol. They also sometimes do manage to have their moments in the sun — coverage in tech media, or brief jumps in price and attention from the crypto community. But both the quality of their technology and their usage by consumers lag behind us. Moreover, they can’t be used as a base to be built on by infinite teams making infinite products like Sentinel is. We won’t waste too many words here trying to tear them down, because that’s mean-spirited and not constructive for the dVPN industry as a whole. S.I.N. wishes them the best of luck, and even admires some of their features and developers — but ultimately they’re going to be left in the dust by Sentinel. There’s a reason this project has the “DVPN” ticker and a reputation as the established leader in the space.
5. Mass adoption could be just around the corner. Let’s take SolarLabs as an example. Instead of doing things the easier way and releasing Solar dVPN applications on their website, they went through the trouble of getting listings on the iOS, Play, and Mac app stores. This was frustrating for some community members waiting to use the apps, but the strategy had an explicit purpose: MASS ADOPTION. Getting onto app stores is a difficult process for developers, especially for Web3 projects; but the reward for it is much, much more exposure to the VPN-using public than just offering files for download on their own websites would allow. Taking the long, slow, hard path to release these apps shows dedication to mass adoption, something a long-term holder of DVPN should be very excited about. Marketing for all Sentinel whitelabels should also be beginning before too long, as the long wait for it has primarily been because release of apps on all platforms (especially Windows) needed to occur first. As efforts to increase Sentinel’s reach to the public ramp up over the upcoming months, the project could achieve the big breakthrough into mainstream consciousness that we’ve all been waiting for.
6. Revenue for stakers is going to increase. Introduction of node revenue sharing will mean 20% of profits from nodes will be shared with Sentinel stakers. Not much more needs to be said about that, because the information is exciting by itself. Revenue will come in the form of the many different cryptocurrencies that dVPN users use to pay for bandwidth, creating an opportunity to earn a wide variety of tokens and coins by buying and staking DVPN. Many new investors will become interested in buying and staking DVPN with this new utility and earning potential added to it.
7. Minimum node pricing is coming. The team has yet to fully elaborate on the full details, but it’s planned to be ushered in along with the Sentinel Next tokenomics upgrade (Proposal 13). At present, node prices are set manually by the node operator and are dictated by the free market; but at this early stage of the project that has resulted in dirt-cheap bandwidth, and therefore minimal buy pressure for the DVPN token. When prices are dialed in manually, they also cannot adjust themselves automatically to market rates. Minimum node pricing will allow Sentinel and its community to decide how much its services will cost to consumers, just as any other business does. The dynamic pricing module (created by validator and Meile dVPN developer MathNodes) will also allow nodes to make automatic adjustments to their rates according to the market. These will be two massive improvements to the Sentinel economy.
8. Development has exploded. New whitelabels that we don’t even know about yet are already building on Sentinel. The Sentinel Android app is being resurrected. New products, which encompass much more than just VPNs, will be developed, including “dChat” and “dVoIP” (meaning that Sentinel could soon be competing with Telegram and Zoom). SolarLabs is going to be releasing its no-code dVPN building toolkit in the coming months, which will open up development of dVPN applications to anybody on the planet with time and a passion for privacy. Sentinel is progressing from being a single-purpose chain to a whole ecosystem of privacy products!
9. The Cosmos Ecosystem as a whole is booming. Sentinel was for the most part not included in the various bear market pumps that have brought the eyes of the whole crypto world onto the Cosmos ecosystem, but the future success of ATOM and other Cosmos chains will undoubtedly fuel future growth of Sentinel and the DVPN token. The further up in the market cap rankings Cosmos goes, the more users will be exposed to smaller cap tokens in the ecosystem like Sentinel. During bull markets, the price of DVPN also correlates to an extent with the price of ATOM. Where is the price of ATOM going to go in the next few years? $1400, says the famous Van Eck Report. Sentinel is lucky to be part of this thriving internet of blockchains, and DVPN price could potentially benefit more from association with Cosmos than it could from any other single thing mentioned in this article.
10. Sentinel has top-notch branding. Don’t underestimate this as a factor. A great logo and name can do wonders for spreading word about a project and fostering a strong connection between a product and its users. The Sentinel logo is an absolute classic, and is just begging to be plastered on t-shirts and walls across the world. The community also has the sort of meme game that most projects would die for.
11. The community is incredibly resilient and strong. Though the bear market has culled our numbers somewhat, there is an almost unbreakable core community standing behind this project. There are disputes, dumps, and drama; but broadly speaking Sentinel community members tend to be very outspoken and militantly dedicated. People with no official ties to the project write articles, run groups, compile lists of resources, reach out to tech sites for coverage, evangelize on social media to bring new users to the applications, create memes, start lotteries and casinos for the DVPN token, and even organize collaborations with other Web3 projects (see for example: validator BadgerBite’s amazing work on the Sentinel integration into Decentr browser). There are hundreds, if not thousands of people running Sentinel nodes for very little monetary gain, motivated almost solely by ideology. The amount of grind that this community puts in would make any other small (or even medium) market cap crypto project extremely envious, and provides Sentinel with a solid base for limitless potential growth.

For the next couple of weeks we’ll probably add more to this piece as we come across/remember more information.