# Sentry Node Open Beta (Concluded)

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Status: Concluded
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The Gradient journey began with the **Sentry Node Open Beta**. The Gradient community’s incredible energy around the Sentry Node Open Beta has brought the network to life. What began as an exploratory initiative has grown into a living foundation powered by thousands of people worldwide.

With millions of participants and billions of Taps, we have established a strong peer-to-peer connectivity foundation. Together, these Sentry Nodes form Lattica, our distributed data communication protocol.\
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Season 1 has concluded on 28 August 2025, 12:00 UTC, marking the graduation of the Sentry Node Open Beta. Sentry Nodes will no longer accumulate new Uptime or Taps after that.<br>

For our community, this is not the end of participation—it is the beginning of the main act.

#### Where to contribute now

* **Run a Host:** Join the [Edge Host Pilot Program](https://docs.gradient.network/user-products/edge-host-pilot-program) to provide compute capacity.
* **Experiment with APIs:** Start building on [Gradient Cloud](https://docs.gradient.network/enterprise-solutions/gradient-cloud).
* **Follow Research:** Read our published papers on Parallax and Echo, and try open-sourced models on our [Hugging Face Collection](https://huggingface.co/Gradientresearch).
* Join the conversation and help us grow the [Discord](https://discord.gg/gradientnetwork) community.
* Follow our [X page](https://x.com/Gradient_HQ) and stay tuned for more exciting ways to participate coming soon.&#x20;