Transcript: “Taking Back Digital Sovereignty with Sentinel dVPN”
Background
This is a Sentinel Independent News (S.I.N.) transcript of Alexandr Litreev’s virtual presentation at the “Greater Reset” conference in Central Texas and Morelia, Mexico on January 21st, 2023. The conference promoted itself as a grassroots response to the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” initiative. Alexandr Litreev is the Russian-born, Estonia-based CEO of SolarLabs, a company which creates whitelabel dVPN applications for the Sentinel blockchain. The presentation was given to a crowd that was largely new to dVPN, and was titled “Taking Back Digital Sovereignty with Sentinel dVPN.”
A link to the original video this transcription was created from can be found here. Special thanks to Seventh for editing and uploading the video, and of course to Mr. Litreev for giving the presentation.
Presentation
“Thank you for the introduction. So yeah, it’s nice to get connected to you guys today and speak at this particular event. That was a great speech given previously about privacy and the importance of it. As you already heard, I’m working on certain products which are meant to bring back privacy to our own hands, and our own product is decentralised VPN.
Yeah, let’s talk about VPNs for a little bit. After the massive speech Edward Snowden gave to the outer world about the mass global surveillance programs that the United States and a number of other governments are running, everybody became much more concerned about their own privacy than they were before.
People started to investigate how they can protect themselves online, and they found out there’s such technology as VPN. They started to use it in order to protect themselves online — protect traffic, their data — and also to combat censorship, because certain governments don’t want you to read some particular news or visit some particular websites, and they block it for you there in your country; and the only option for you to get there is to use VPN.
Are those VPN services safe, actually? Well, not really.
What I would like to do is give you a slight review of VPN services by giving you one number which is insane. How does it sound if I tell you that 105 VPN services all around the globe are run just by 24 companies? Maybe you can find some of the VPN services that you use there on the list. There is the biggest groups of companies which are running those VPN services. For example, NordVPN running Surfshark, NordVPN, and Atlas VPN services. There is a company called Kape Technologies, they are running CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, and ExpressVPN. You probably never heard that those VPN services are actually not competing with each other, but just flooding the market to make sure that you go and use one of the products of those companies.
Considering that those companies are centralised VPN services, we can not be sure and believe their promise that they do not keep logs, or believe their promise that they do not cooperate with governments or any third parties. So we came up with a solution which is meant to fix that problem, because the current VPN is broken.
The solution is Sentinel, Sentinel blockchain. It brings back our privacy from VPN services by making it decentralised. We took the idea of Bitcoin, decentralised money, which is out there for a while — as you know — and we decided to put the same idea behind VPN services to make sure that we start bringing back privacy to our own hands from a very, very low level — from the internet itself, not from the services that use it.
How exactly does Sentinel work? Sentinel is a decentralised network as I told you already; anyone can spin up their own servers and provide traffic for other users. Let’s say that you are at home, or that you’re on a certain server or data centre, and you have some bandwidth remaining that you are willing to share with the community. You can put your own server into the Sentinel Network, and there is thousands of users who will be able to use your device as an exit point.
As we call it decentralised VPN, it means that there is no centre. There is no certain company as on this list… They cannot identify you, they cannot keep records, they cannot link you to a certain server or something, because they don’t have your identity.
As we see there, multiple applications can also benefit from the one Sentinel Network; so let’s say there is a company, SolarLabs, which is my company, which is doing dVPN applications. There are numbers of other companies which are building on top of Sentinel, and all of those companies are consuming the benefits of the Sentinel blockchain by giving users a fair choice of which servers you would like to use, how you would like to be connected, which protocols you would like to choose, and more.
To connect to Sentinel you don’t need to enter your credit card details, you don’t need to create an account, you don’t need to buy a subscription or something. You just use an anonymous wallet on the dVPN network, and you just top it up with tokens from any exchange or decentralized exchange or any other method you can use. There’s no way for providers to actually know who you are and how you use your VPN.
As I told you, there is a possibility for us to also use this network, so that’s why we came up with our own VPN application; it’s called Solar dVPN. I’ll give a link for download of this application at the end of my speech, but for now let’s talk a bit more about the benefits of decentralized VPN.
We can divide the idea of using VPN services for two areas, two fields. the first one is to make sure we keep it private. For example, we know that there are certain internet service providers which are trying to track us; to steal our data, sell it somewhere; cooperate with governments on spying on people, and many other things that are happening out there. So we would like to protect ourselves from that, and using dVPN to encrypt our traffic and make sure that no one will ever know what’s inside of it.
The second use of VPN services which can be there is to combat censorship, and decentralized VPN services are extremely good at it. Unlike the other centralized VPN services such as NordVPN, ExpressVPN, and many others, those are not really able to withstand censorship in certain countries. For example, in Russia, there is a number of websites which are blocked and cannot be accessed without VPN services. And people started to use VPN services in Russia back in 2018, but since then the government learned a lot about people actually using VPN services. They banned VPN services as well. So NordVPN, ExpressVPN, and many other old-school VPN services are not available in Russia, and they cannot let you there.
So what other choices do people have there? Exactly, they can use a dVPN service. dVPN service by its own decentralized nature cannot be blocked by a certain government. It’s like trying to block Bitcoin — pretty useless idea. You cannot do it the same way as you do it with a centralized VPN.
For example, if a government would like to ban some centralized VPN service, they will go after the certain company which runs it, they will learn which IP addresses they have, which networks do they use, is there any sort of legal entities or something… They will use it against this VPN service, they will ban it, and they will make sure you never access it. But with dVPN technology the situation is totally different. You cannot do the same because there is no legal entity which is behind the service, there is no certain IP address range you can ban, there is no one to go after.
We’re already operating successfully in some countries which have problems of democracy (let’s say it like that) for example China, Russia, Iran and many other countries like that where internet is not free as it should be. We can confirm that for now Solar dVPN successfully provides people with the connectivity to the free world for thousands of users simultaneously.
Taking back privacy is not only about services that you use, but also about the way you get connected to the internet itself. To start taking back our sovereignty online, you should start by making your connection to the internet really private, and to do so I really encourage all of you guys to get connected to the decentralized VPN network. There is a beautiful app that we have you can download it by scanning this QR code, and it’s available for all platforms on mobile devices and certain desktops. We’re kicking out our Windows application next month and we can’t wait to see you using it.
That’s pretty much it from my side, and I appreciate you guys inviting me here. Yeah, that’s it, thank you.”
Q&A Segment
[Question from host] “So tell me this, I noticed on the Solar dVPN channel recently that there was something about being able to use the dVPN through Telegram, can you tell us more about that?”
LITREEV: “What we’re working on is to make sure that people are actually able to use dVPN normally by using our apps on mobile devices, but also through the messenger. Our idea is to create a bot which is capable of letting you connect to dVPN service so you don’t have to install any sort of applications on your device. It’s still in progress, but we believe we will be able to push it out something like the end of the next month.”
[Question from host] “Where is the product at right now? Can people go to the website and purchase or download the dVPN and start using it?”
LITREEV: “Yeah, if you use our link there to download our application or go to our website solarlabs.ee, since we’re based in Estonia, and it gives you that beautiful application, which I obviously have on my own device… [shows Solar dVPN app on phone] It lets you choose the certain nodes or any kind — there are thousands of them. Thousands of servers are spinned up on the network, and all of them are run by the community; it’s not run by some certain company or something.
You can get connected… For example, I can choose Europe, and there is a bunch of countries which are available out there; for example I can choose, let’s say, Switzerland, and there is a node in Switzerland available. You can choose how much data you would like to buy to use that dVPN service from Switzerland.
This app works on a pay-as-you-go model, so you don’t have to buy some subscription which you probably will not use at some point. You just pay for what you use, pay-as-you go model we have there. You buy some certain amount of data and you consume it, and comparing to others… Since it is decentralised and there is open competition between those people who run dVPN nodes, the price of dVPN service is cheaper than any other. You can get connected as cheap as just one cent for a gigabyte, there is nothing like that available on the market.”
[Question from audience member] “Hey Alexandr, my name is Rafal. Great project. I have a quick question for you about the actual privacy and security.
From my understanding, people are able to install nodes or instances, and people route through. So for example, if I install an instance on my internet connection, and then somebody uses that and they do anything illegal — let’s say downloads porn, which is in some countries illegal — and then my IP provider finds out that it was me, am I responsible for somebody else’s actions? How does that work?”
LITREEV: “That’s a great question, thank you. It works pretty much the same way that TOR does. Basically, in certain countries there is such a problem which can get you in trouble if somebody uses your IP address to get to the outer web. However, we understand that this is an issue and it should be addressed somehow, so we came up with a solution; and the solution is to have multi-hop connections to the nodes which can be marked as trusted.
For example, if you don’t want to let people go to the internet and use your device as an exit point, but you would still like to participate in the Sentinel blockchain, you will be able to spin up your own node and make it one of the nodes in the multi-hop relay network which will let people go online. Basically anything that will be sent through your device will be encrypted in and out, and you will be protected from such kind of activity. It’s up to you to decide if you would like to take those risks or not.”
[Question from audience member] “Hi Alex, I’m looking to ditch my Microsoft and go to Linux Mint. Do you support Linux Mint?”
LITREEV: “Yes, definitely. We recently shipped a great app for both Mac OS and Linux. We are available for all Linux distros. Actually you can download it right away on our own website, which I believe I showed- I will show it one more time. If you scan this QR code, you can download applications for iOS, Android, iPad, Linux, Mac OS; and Windows coming up soon next month. You can download this application from our website, and you can get connected just a few taps from there.”
[Question from host] “Are you on the F-Droid Store?”
LITREEV: “Not yet, but we are looking forward to getting there. As for now, we are shipping our app through Google Play and APK file if you would like to download one. We are also going to Huawei AppGallery to make sure that we are available for these particular sorts of devices, because Google Play is obviously not available there [in China]. And we would like to push our app to as much markets as possible, so to the end of the year we will be probably be everywhere already.”
