A couple weeks back I posted the faucet here: Another faucet post, I know. This one mines its own TAZ. It has been running quietly since, so I put together a retroactive grant application and wanted to share it with everyone.
Quick recap for anyone who missed the first post. Most testnet faucets are just a hosted wallet behind a form, which means you are trusting someone else’s node and someone else’s keys to get started on a privacy chain. That felt backwards to me. So this one runs the whole thing itself: its own Zebra node, its own Zallet wallet, an embedded Zaino indexer, and its own miner. The drips go out shielded z-to-z, so even the faucet’s payouts stay private. It is live at https://zcashfaucet.jinolabs.xyz and the code is open at GitHub - jinolabs-xyz/zcash-faucet: Self-sovereign Zcash testnet faucet. Runs its own node, wallet and miner, pays shielded z2z drips, and gates claims with browser proof of work instead of a captcha vendor. · GitHub.
People are actually using it, which has been the fun part. 30 drips so far and 17 of those landed just in the last week, so word is getting around that there is a faucet you can rely on while you build.
Running the real stack also turned up real bugs. @zooko suggested on the launch thread if it could hand out cTAZ too, and going down that road took me into the Crosslink node, where I found and fixed two genuine issues (a wallet-drain gRPC bind and a payout RPC that reported success before it actually sent) and filed a diagnosed root cause on top. Those are all up as PRs and an issue upstream now.
Honestly though this is the start, not the finish. There is a lot of dev tooling around Zcash still waiting to be built, and I think devrel here is about to get really good. Happy to answer anything in the thread.