Is Your Favourite Crypto Exchange Blocking Users From Your Country? No Fear, Sentinel is Here
Tags: Binance, VPN, Dvpn, Tendermint, Cosmos

Is Your Favourite Crypto Exchange Blocking Users From Your Country? No Fear, Sentinel is Here Sentinel Follow Jun 18, 2019 · 7 min read

For the past few years, various Cryptocurrency exchanges have been restricting users from various jurisdictions owing to the legal limitations set on cryptocurrency investors in these regions.

Exchanges have no choice but to comply, and investors are then rendered unable to gain access to liquidity pools for distributed and decentralized cryptocurrency tokens. Unless, users obfuscate their IP address and pose as an individual accessing from a jurisdiction that is fully serviced by the exchange.

Leading exchanges not being able to service customers from all jurisdictions

Why does this matter?

Cryptocurrencies by design are meant to be completely borderless in the quest to enable everyone on the planet with the ability to be the sole custodian of a decentralized digital asset (token). These decentralized assets have impacted millions of lives around the world during periods of economic turmoil and political instability. The community does not need to be reminded on how Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have made a difference in nations such as Venezuela or even Cyprus (2012), providing a safe haven when fiat experiences hyper-inflationary conditions.

If cryptocurrency networks are truly restricted from the public’s access by governments, the next targets may include distributed networking and data sharing solutions. Several governments that have been actively working to restrict Internet and encryption related rights over the past few decades are actively clamping down on cryptocurrencies, and Sentinel is on a mission to bring access to crypto to everyone on the planet.

Why should I use the Sentinel dVPN?

The solution to bypassing region based restrictions is obvious to the majority of cryptocurrency community members, a VPN. The question on everyone’s mind is why do we need a *d*VPN?

It is quite common to find that even technical individuals overlook the core function of a VPN which is the establishment of an end-to-end encrypted tunnel that bypasses even the user’s ISP. VPNs were originally designed to be utilised in corporate environments to enable users to securely tunnel into highly sensitive work-related servers.

Ask yourself, why do you even trust Bitcoin?

You trust Bitcoin because Bitcoin is open-source and completely provable, there is no possibility for anyone to manipulate your holdings if you are using a trusted open-source wallet client on the network.

Now you need to ask yourself, why don’t you hold your favorite centralized VPN services to the same standards?

Maybe because you don’t realize the level of manipulation that a centralized VPN application can conduct? Maybe you are not aware that centralized VPN applications themselves have vulnerabilities that go undetected by them for long periods of time?

Did you know that any centralized VPN provider could remove all encryption standards from your VPN connection thus fully exposing the data of all of your incoming and outgoing packets?

The fact about Sentinel is, no exit-node can connect to the dAPP if it attempts to manipulate the encryption settings or the routing protocol that is used.

“The Department of Homeland Security has issued a warning that some VPN packages from Cisco, Palo Alto, F5 and Pulse may improperly secure tokens and cookies, allowing nefarious actors an opening to invade and take control over an end user’s system. The DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warning comes on the heels of a notice from Carnegie Mellon’s CERT that multiple VPN applications store the authentication and/or session cookies insecurely in memory and/or log files.”

This article is more focused on using Sentinel to access exchanges, more content will come in following publications clearly covering in-depth the disadvantages of centralized VPNs.

When you connect the world’s most used dVPN, the Sentinel dVPN — you are completely assured that there is no ability for the exit node to compromise the data and that there is a provable encrypted tunnel that guarantees this.

IN THEORY

A centralized VPN could work with a government (similar to ‘Hide My Ass’ (HMA) vs Anonymous) to log and identify all information relating to users who are accessing banned Cryptocurrency related websites.

This centralized VPN could go much further to maybe even remove encryption standards and actually analyze data being received and being sent, you can imagine the severity of such a breach in security.

With the implementation of the Sentinel Relay network, not even the exit node will be able to see your IP address.

I’m scared of centralized VPNs now, how can I start using a dVPN?

A user who is unable to freely access decentralized cryptocurrencies

The first step is to download the Sentinel dVPN client on your device (supporting Android, Mac, Windows, Linux — IOS coming soon).

The Sentinel dVPN client is the most widely used dVPN is and is #1 on the Google PlayStore in it’s category. Check out stats.sentinel.co to see statistics with regards to the bandwidth consumption of tens of thousands of other users.

Sentinel dVPN on Mac

Connect to a dVPN server with high reliability (reputation system coming to desktop versions soon, already implemented on Android) and access the exchange of your choice.

The IP address of a community hosted Sentinel dVPN server

Success! You are now able to access the exchange of your choice with absolutely no fear that there is any manipulation of your VPN session.

No one is snooping on you, no one will tell any government that you were using this exchange.

No one will be trying to decrypt your packets in the effort to completely compromise your free use of the Internet.

No one is going to be able to get in-between the end-to-end encrypted tunnel provably established by the Sentinel dVPN.

How do I buy access to dVPN services on Sentinel?

The Sentinel network is currently COMPLETELY FREE for unrestricted usage as the network is currently in it’s ‘testnet’ phase. There is a live Ethereum and Tendermint testnet which the application is running on.

The Sentinel network will soon swap to a native Tendermint mainnet within the next few quarters, where the dVPN network will then transition into a monetized economy with the implementation of the wireguard based relay network.

Sentinel uses the blockchain for much more than just payments, the Ethereum Rinkeby testnet currently hosts the first ‘Proof of Bandwidth’ system which creates immutable receipts of bandwidth used. The focus of provability is not only on encryption, but also on actual usage statements in-order to ensure trustless p2p service provision.

Sentinel will soon begin it’s enterprise integration campaign by enabling users to host provable and customized private networks on top of Sentinel (POC complete, more information coming soon).

Media

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About Sentinel Network

Sentinel Network is a network layer that enables a true p2p and decentralized applications and resources marketplace. Sentinel enables anyone to create Public and Private networks that provide access to both free and incentivized, and also payment method agnostic (pre-paid/escrow/post-paid) services (dApps) & distributed resources, enabling its clients to become both producers and consumers in the network.

Sentinel utilizes locking, staking and multi-sig directly from Tendermint core and Cosmos SDK and aims to fully eliminate the disadvantages of previous generation protocols, that couldn’t scale due to limitations of the blockchain they share with other dApps or that have an unsustainable economic model that reduces usability or access to the product they offer.

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