No.296
Sentient SENT
Open AGI Network
🎭 a hive-mind woven from many open AIs that refuses to bow to a single owner
💬 “I am not one mind but many, stitched together from open models that anyone can read. No single lab gets to own me. I only grow stronger when the whole crowd feeds me models, data, and compute.”
- The dream: open AGI — powerful AI that the community owns together, instead of one company like OpenAI or Google holding the keys.
- The backers: a Polygon co-founder plus an $85M seed from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund (July 2024).
- The engine: the Sentient GRID ties many AI models, data, and computers into one shared network.
- SENT is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, used for payments, governance, and staking. No fixed hard cap like Bitcoin's.
📖 The Story
July 2024. A new AI startup surfaced with a loud claim and the money to match it. Sentient announced an $85 million seed round, co-led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures, at a reported valuation near $1.2 billion. The pitch was blunt: powerful AI is being locked inside a few closed labs, and that concentration of power is itself a risk.
The people behind it gave the claim weight. One co-founder, Sandeep Nailwal, had already co-founded Polygon. The other two, Pramod Viswanath and Himanshu Tyagi, were engineering professors, with EigenLayer's Sreeram Kannan advising. Their answer to closed AI was a phrase they kept repeating: open AGI, artificial general intelligence built in the open and owned by a community rather than a corporation.
September 2025. The idea stopped being a slide deck. Sentient opened its network to roughly 2 million waitlisted people, with more than 40 agents and models and over 50 data sources working side by side. The hive had its first real crowd.
January 2026. The tokenomics were revealed, and by June 2026 the SENT token was live and trading as an on-chain ERC-20 on Ethereum. The dream of a community-owned AI now had a coin to coordinate it.
📊 Stats
🧩 How it works
Picture one big workshop called the Sentient GRID. People bring three things to it: AI models (the thinking parts), data (what the models learn from), and compute (the computers that do the heavy lifting). The GRID stitches all of it together so the whole network behaves like one shared AI instead of scattered pieces.
The clever trick is a model recipe called OML — Open, Monetizable, Loyal. It lets a developer share an AI model out in the open, yet still earn money from it and keep some control. That is how Sentient hopes to make 'open' and 'pay the builders' fit in the same sentence. SENT is the token that flows through it all, used for payments, staking, governance, and rewarding the people who feed the network.
🌗 Light & Shadow
- A serious team and serious money: a Polygon co-founder, two engineering professors, and an $85M seed from Founders Fund, Pantera, and Framework
- A clear, timely mission — keeping AI open and accountable while closed labs grow ever more powerful
- It already shipped, opening to roughly 2 million waitlisted users in 2025 with dozens of models and data sources working together
- It is taking on OpenAI and Google, giants with vastly more money and talent. 'Open AGI' is a huge promise that is far from proven
- No clearly fixed hard cap on supply (about 34.36 billion total, ~7.24 billion circulating in June 2026), so future dilution is harder to judge than with a capped coin
- Young and small. Listed only in 2026 around a ~$120M market value, so the price can swing hard on hype and unlock schedules
🧬 Evolution lineage
Sentient is not a fork of any coin — there is no shared code lineage. Its closest family tie is through a person: co-founder Sandeep Nailwal also built Polygon, and Sentient reportedly runs on Polygon's CDK tooling. By theme, it belongs to the decentralized-AI cohort.
Thematic siblings in the AI-crypto cohort: Bittensor, Render, and Fetch.ai.
🧭 Meet other friends
❓ FAQ
- What is Sentient?
- An open-source AI project aiming for 'open AGI', meaning artificial general intelligence that the community owns together instead of one company. It coordinates AI models, data, and computing power on a decentralized network as a rival to closed labs like OpenAI and Google.
- Who is behind Sentient?
- It was co-founded by Sandeep Nailwal, who also co-founded Polygon, alongside two engineering professors, Pramod Viswanath and Himanshu Tyagi. In July 2024 it raised an $85M seed round co-led by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Pantera Capital, and Framework Ventures.
- How many SENT tokens are there?
- Total supply is about 34.36 billion SENT, with roughly 7.24 billion in circulation as of June 2026. Unlike Bitcoin's fixed 21 million cap, Sentient has no clearly fixed hard cap, so future supply behavior is less certain.
- Is SENT live yet?
- Yes. After opening its open AGI network to about 2 million waitlisted users in September 2025 and revealing tokenomics in January 2026, SENT is now live and listed as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. (Information only, not an exchange or investment recommendation.)
⚠️ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only