Term
Faucet
A crypto faucet is a service that gives out small amounts of tokens for free — historically for marketing (early Bitcoin faucets giving away real BTC), now almost exclusively for handing out testnet tokens to developers.
A faucet is a service that dispenses a small amount of cryptocurrency to any address that asks. In the early Bitcoin era, faucets gave away real BTC as a marketing tool — the original bitcoin.org faucet dispensed 5 BTC per user in 2010, which sounds absurd now.
Modern faucets almost exclusively hand out testnet tokens: valueless copies of ETH, BTC, or other assets on a test network. Developers use them to fund test transactions during integration work without spending real money. Typical faucets rate-limit per address per day so a single developer can't drain them.
Occasional "real value" faucets still exist for new chain launches or airdrop campaigns, but they are the exception. If a site claims to give away real Ethereum or Bitcoin for free, it is almost always a scam.
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