Sentinel Protocol
Two engineers.
Two continents.
- ✓10+ years as a software engineer.
- ✓Founding Engineer at a Boost VC startup that was acquired.
- ✓2 years building in blockchain.
- ✓Web2: Ruby, Python, TypeScript.
- ✓Web3: Solidity, Rust, applied ZK.
- ✓8 years as a software developer (ex–big-bank engineer).
- ✓Frontend specialist — React, TypeScript, Angular.
- ✓2 years in blockchain — Solidity, Move, Rust.
- ✓Contributor to the OpenZeppelin Soroban Library — vault contracts for SEP-56 (Soroban's ERC-4626 equivalent).
A wildfire,
and a better way to pay claims.
I live in Northern California, where wildfires have repeatedly burned down whole communities — and left people fighting insurers for months.
That experience pushed me toward parametric insurance: payouts triggered by a verifiable real-world event, not an adjuster's judgment. Flights are the right first step — flight status is one of the cleanest real-world data feeds, easy to convert into a trustworthy oracle signal for a smart contract. If we can settle delays automatically, the same architecture extends to fire, hurricane, and other climate-driven risks where payouts matter most.
The timing is right because prediction markets have gone mainstream. Polymarket and Kalshi made it normal to bet on real-world outcomes on-chain. Sentinel takes that primitive and points it at something useful: hedging risk you actually face.
Travelers get insurance that pays automatically.
Same mechanism as Polymarket — but more than gambling.
Flight insurance
is broken.
- ✕File a claim. Wait weeks. Get denied on a technicality.
- ✕Insurance companies profit by not paying. They decide if you get paid.
- ✕You can't verify the insurer has the money to pay you.
A prediction market.
Used as travel insurance.
Travelers buy delay payouts. Underwriters fund them. The smart contract settles automatically — and from the traveler's point of view, it's parametric insurance.
- ✓Flight delayed? Payout is automatic. No claim form, no adjuster.
- ✓The contract is the policy. Anyone can read it. Nobody can rewrite it.
- ✓An automated keeper checks every 5 minutes. No human in the loop.
- ✓Every policy is 100% backed. The vault always has the cash.
CZzgUBvxaMLwMhVSLgqJn3npmxoTo6nzMNQPAnwtHF3sEarn yield.
No active management.
Deposit PUSD into the shared vault. Receive shares. Every on-time flight returns premiums — share price rises automatically.
Hedge your flight.
Get paid instantly.
Pay a small premium. If your flight is delayed, the payout is ready automatically. No claim form. No adjuster. No waiting weeks for a decision.
claim() and receive PUSD.How it works
Four Cron Jobs Run the System
The Oracle runs on a phone.
Sentinel's flight-data oracle runs on Acurast — a DePIN network where the workers are real Android phones. Our TypeScript runs inside each phone's secure chip; the API calls and the on-chain writes both happen from inside the TEE.
One API call per insured flight.
A naive insurer polls every flight, every hour. We don't. Flights enter the oracle's watch list only when someone buys coverage. We only call the API after a flight should have landed. The moment settlement runs, the flight drops off the list. Cost scales with active policies — not with flights in the sky.
Two layers. Both matter.
A flight from JFK to LAX next Tuesday is fundamentally different from JFK to Tehran during a war. One number can't price both. So we use two layers — one looks backward, one looks forward.
Every policy is
100% backed. Always.
Before every sale, the contract checks: does the vault have enough free cash to cover this payout? If not, the sale is refused. No exceptions.
✕ blocked — vault has $100 free, payout would be $100+. Not enough.
Capital is locked
fairly, not arbitrarily.
If your withdrawal would dip into locked capital, it joins a queue. As flights settle and cash frees up, the queue drains in order — first in, first out. No jumping the line.