I started my adventure into web3 development last week.
It began with a lot of confusion, excitement, and wondering why the place where my friend works has a faucet on the internet, and why that faucet is dripping.
It started out with a suggestion from my mentor, that I should check out thirdweb. So I applied for early access, and a few hours later, minted my early access NFT! I hopped onto discord, where most blockchain projects seem to live, and quickly found the project dashboard in the thirdweb gui.
You have the opportunity to work with a bunch of different testnets, though the first one I went with was Rinkby. I swapped my metamask wallet over to the network and got a notifcation, warning me about having zero funds. Kindly enough, it linked to paradigm’s faucet. And off I went to get the testing funds!
I was greeted by a familiar looking logo (I participated in their CTF this/last year) and a little note saying that the faucet dripped funds every 24 hours. Being me, I had the visual of a big corp building of the paradigm people with a comically large faucet welded onto the side, letting a slow drip of water out. Why were they leaking? What did they need a faucet? I checked their site and found more confusion.
As well as a ton of google searches that basically led me to conclude that I don’t know what a faucet is…at least on the internet. [my web search skills were not having a hot day, or it was 2am, or both]. Thankfully, kind folks in the discord and in des femmes slack group helped me get on my way, finding another faucet, and getting some testnet funds. Monopoly money in hand, I excitedly marched forward with getting a project out.
A quick search today of testnet faucet will let you know that a faucet allows you to fund transactions on a given blockchain without real money! I’m not exactly sure how, but every set period [24 hours seems to be popular] the faucet drips a tiny amount of cryptocurrency so that you can trial and error things on testnets.
There are tons of different faucets online! Some of them work with certain chains, some multiple chains. Just be wary of where you’re connecting your wallet to — not to say that any particular faucet might be a scam, but always be careful connecting your wallet!
testnets I’ve used:
- https://faucets.chain.link/