The problem TxSentinel solves

It’s very hard to stay protected on the blockchain: new protocols emerge daily, bots try to snatch up all our transactions, countless scams are targeting us. We have plenty of security solutions, but each one is specialized in a certain area, chain, or for a specific wallet.

But what if there were a way to solve this without the user having to pay a subscription, compatible with all chains and protocols, covering a wide variety of issues—and what if you could be the one to solve this problem?

We’ve built a decentralized “firewall” for transactions. We work like an RPC that you configure in any wallet; when you send a transaction, we hold it for a few seconds and send it to a pool of bots—these could be companies or blockchain enthusiasts. These bots analyze the transaction, and if they detect any risk to the user’s funds, the user is notified, allowing them to block the transaction or let it go through. If they block it, a reward is sent to the bot that detected the issue. If they let it pass, they don’t pay anything.

It’s a simple but powerful solution. The user only pays if there’s an issue, and they have the power to reverse it. Imagine someone informs you that this transaction will lose you $1,000, but for $1, you can reverse it—easy choice, right?

We’re empowering the entire community with security and creating a monetary incentive so that these bots, which usually only operate to exploit users, can now be reoriented to help them.

To test our solution, we created a bot that analyzes when a user makes a swap on a DEX. For this, we use the Noves API to translate the transaction and determine if it is a swap, as well as provide the result in tokens for that operation on the DEX.

Then, to find the best rate, if the rate provided by Odos is better, we notify the user so they can make a decision and generate a swap link through Odos, allowing the user to take advantage of the better opportunity.

Challenges we ran into

When we were developing the warning bot for better swaps, we encountered the challenge of differentiating between various DEXs and identifying the value on each specific DEX. With the Noves tool, we were able to resolve this easily because it translated the transaction as a swap and provided the token price for that transaction—everything we needed :)

For price prediction, we needed an alternative that would find the best price so the user could decide what to do with that transaction. Here, Odos' quote feature provided us with the best price.

Since we act as intermediaries in sending transactions, we introduce some latency to the transaction. This is an issue, but with the multiple RPC relay addon, we can better position our transaction for mining and improve the user experience.