Tokens

Faucet

A service that hands out tiny amounts of crypto for free, mainly to fund testing on test networks.

A faucet drips small amounts of crypto to anyone who asks. The earliest one, run by Gavin Andresen in 2010, gave away 5 BTC per visit to bootstrap Bitcoin's user base—a fortune at today's prices, near worthless then.

Today most faucets serve testnets. Developers need test ETH to deploy and try contracts without spending real money, and a faucet supplies it on request.

Mainnet faucets still exist for marketing or airdrops, but they're prime bait for bots and Sybil farms gaming the giveaway.

Related terms

Testnet

A sandbox copy of a blockchain where developers trial code using tokens that hold no value.

Airdrop

A free distribution of tokens to wallets, often to reward early users or bootstrap a new community.

Satoshi

The smallest unit of bitcoin, equal to one hundred-millionth of a single coin.

Sybil Attack

An attack where one actor spins up many fake identities to gain outsized influence over a network.

All terms