diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index 89870a39a1..dba9fc4fed 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -12,6 +12,8 @@ All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.
   - Harden ledger writes against a slow/degraded RPC endpoint: bound each RPC request (default 15s, `--ledger-rpc-timeout`), size the connection pool above the submitter concurrency (default 128, `--ledger-rpc-max-conns`), and deadline each submission attempt so it fails fast and retries with a fresh blockhash instead of sending an expired one and failing preflight with `BlockhashNotFound`. (#3973)
 - E2E
   - Fix the multicast settlement QA test's seat-allocation ack wait. It read the reused client seat at finalized commitment and could accept the previous run's already-acked state, then withdraw while the current request was still pending. It now waits to observe the request pending before treating a cleared flag as the ack. (#3972)
+- Sentinel
+  - Enable the `reqwest` `json` feature explicitly for the sentinel crate, which relies on `Response::json()` in the validator metadata reader and multicast publisher after the workspace dependency stopped enabling it by default. (#3986)
 
 ## [v0.29.0](https://github.com/malbeclabs/doublezero/compare/client/v0.28.0...client/v0.29.0) - 2026-07-02
 
diff --git a/crates/sentinel/Cargo.toml b/crates/sentinel/Cargo.toml
index e3048733d0..7c67eba609 100644
--- a/crates/sentinel/Cargo.toml
+++ b/crates/sentinel/Cargo.toml
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ metrics.workspace = true
 # this crate with default-features = false, doesn't link it. Any future daemon-only dep must go
 # here too, or the CLI bloat returns.
 metrics-exporter-prometheus = { workspace = true, optional = true }
-reqwest.workspace = true
+reqwest = { workspace = true, features = ["json"] }
 serde.workspace = true
 serde_json.workspace = true
 solana-account-decoder.workspace = true