ZecFaucet.com: A community Zec Faucet

3rd Party Applications
1

Hello forum!

Today I want to present ZecFaucet.com.

A faucet? But why?

As I was writing a zingolib wrapper library, I decided to also write a demo application on how to use it. So I coded this faucet.
At first it was supposed to be a internal demo only, but now it getting very popular.

Why have a faucet?

  • Faucets are a very good first contact with a cryptocurrency.
  • It have the potential of attracting new users.

This faucet is an experiment, that why I want it to be a community faucet. It has a donation address. All donations is kept 100% in the faucet wallet. Fell free to donate to the faucet and keep it running.

Running a faucet requires hosting, developing and maintaining the code. All of it is being paid with my minor grants reward. But if you would like to support me directly, fell free send me direct message.

As I said, itā€™s just an experiment, The faucet right now is paying 0.0005 ZEC every 30 minutes (per user). Is that much? I donā€™t know yet. All can change, The faucet is out only for 2 or 3 days now ā€¦ I want to discuss all this if you guys. Letā€™s make this together!

Let me know what you think, is a faucet a good idea? Is it bad for Zcash?

Also, Iā€™m not a web developer, if anyone could look at the code and make it safer, please do!

P.S.:
The faucet has crashed two or three times, itā€™s experimental and provided as is. There is no guarantee the users will receive the 0.0005 claim. But with more development it will provide a better experience for the users.

P.S. 2: I almost forgot. I want to thank whoever sent 3 ZEC to the faucet! Thank you anonymous donator!

13 Likes
2

I love the idea of the faucet. I havent a close look at it yet so some of these points/recommendations may not apply.

  1. paying out only to a UA will force people to download a wallet and try out orchard pool
  2. use the faucet as a driver to sign up to any zcash social media or newsletters by giving multiplier bonuses for each thing signs up for

A really good example is the horizen faucet that was built a few years ago. It drives people to engage with the product they are trying to grow users with.

Ps i know I talk about horizen a lot, but it was one of the first coins I started to follow way back in '17 and they have done some good stuff

3 Likes
3

While i do not agree that we should force people to try out the orchard pool it also is also inaccurate because you can have a unified address that does not contain an orchard receiver. Unified addresses are largely designed to support legacy transactions and the term is loosely mixed with orchard addresses which are themselves technically a type of UA.

1 Like
4

Nice work.

IMO you should remove, ā€œDue to a high volume of transactions on the Zcash network currently, ZecFaucet may encounter some delays or irregularities in its operation.ā€ It makes it appears as if the network is tedious. And there is certainly not a high volume of txs as the network has been averaging something like ~3 tx per minute.

2 Likes
5

https://zcashblockexplorer.com/mempool
At the time of this post there are over 6400 transactions in the mempool. This is the current nature of the sand blasting attack and why wallets need to upgrade soon to support the new transaction fee method.

2 Likes
6

I though of doing something like this:

image
image872Ɨ434 39.1 KB

  • User will receive 0.0005 ZEC if using Orchard address
  • User will receive 0.0004 ZEC if using Sapling address
  • User will receive 0.0003 ZEC if using Transparent address

But wouldnā€™t it look like ZEC isnā€™t fungible? Would it give a impression that ZEC worth more or less depending on the address used?

4 Likes
7

Since the start of the faucet the ratio between shielded and transparent addresses claiming the faucet was really balanced. But today the usage of transparent addresses skyrocketed :flushed:
Look a this (failed) transaction for example: Zcash transaction c69bd582e7f9dcb33adcbbeac94ee45ec58d18a1a731cf088112a8d1f568c3b8 ā€” 3xpl

Maybe a clickfarm of some sort?

I think iā€™m going to disable transparent support altogether. Users would only be able to claim to a sapling or archard address. What do you guys think?

Also, some sus activity on this address: Zcash address t1YQV51DKzKP63xJcynXuRfryMjfmgTJ7Jc ā€” 3xpl
Why an address with over $700k USD need to use a faucet? Even worse, it didnā€™t claimed directly, it claimed to another t address and then sent to this one. This address has tons of small transactions (0.0001 or less) with the smallest fee Iā€™ve ever seen: 0.00000555 ZEC. Weird.

3 Likes
9

I support this!

6 Likes
10

If possible I will reiterate that it is a good idea if possible to make people sign up with an email to login to claim, then they can be updated on zcash news/information

11

Interesting, but I feel like it would a invasion of the userā€™s privacy to ask for his/her personal email address. Most likely people would use a temp mail serviceā€¦

But I think would be a good idea to put some Zcash link on the faucet website, like twitter account, telegram groups, discord server, this forum, etc ā€¦

1 Like
12

Also a quick update on the faucet.
Iā€™d say the faucet is working pretty ok now. But I had a lot of trouble making it work.
Transactions were failing often with the (zingolib) default fixed fee of 0.0001 ZEC.
Then I bumped the fee to 0.001 ZEC, then transactions stop failing (sometimes still got few minutes to confirm).
The faucet sends transactions every 3 minutes (for various reasons), but sometimes the payment queue had only 1 address to pay and I felt really dumb paying a fee of 0.001 ZEC to send 0.0005 ZEC :laughing:. So I implemented an ad hoc solution in the form of a fake zip317 fee system with the formula BASE_FEE + EXTRA_FEE * length(recipients).
Now the faucet (the underlying zingolib) has a base fee of 0.0004 ZEC and an extra 0.0001 ZEC for each address in the queue. So a transaction to 1 adfdress will cost 0.0005 ZEC (0.0004 + 0.0001), sending to 15 addresses for instance will cost 0.0019 ZEC (0.0004 + 0.0015). Still i think Iā€™m paying too much, but itā€™s working flawlessly now.

The faucet still crashes sometimes because zingolib thinks some confirmed transactions expired, This messes up the wallet balance and note selection and then I get ā€œduplicated nullifierā€ error when sending. So at least once or twice a day I have to re-sync the wallet.

edit
Added transactions examples

3 Likes
13

You can probably save fees while keep being compliant with ZIP-317 by using

0.00005 * (length(recipients) + 1)

without any base fee. Or use +2 there to be extra sure in case there are multiple input notes.

3 Likes
14

also unfortunate the zingolib issue, did you report it?

1 Like
15

A facuet is a marketing tool not a charity in my eyes. Having a login fake email or not also mitigates against people draining the wallet.

I strongly urge you to take a look at https://getzen.cash/ its a good system, you sign up with email and every different action you do like following social media accounts, or signing up to a newletter you get a multiplier to how much you receive.

16

Itā€™s not 2013. Faucets arenā€™t the needle mover here in terms of adoption.

1 Like
17

How about making the faucet memos more interestingā€¦Zcash folklore, history, weird stuff, funny stuff, message of the day, whatever - use something like ā€˜fortuneā€™ to get a random message.

6 Likes
18

Thatā€™s a cool idea. One of the main reasons I think zecpages is criminally underrated.

19

Faucets are prone to abuse, but they can be a cool tool to get new users foot in the door. Thanks for all your hard work with this faucet.

20

In fact, faucets are actually a great idea for the cryptocurrency world. I will tell my own experience of how I collected almost three bitcoins between 2016-2017. I found out about a faucet in Barcelona and it was a QR code. I just followed someoneā€™s referral link and for fun I tried it from my phone. I wouldnā€™t have done it, but at that point I already knew what bitcoin was. Just knew, without any far-reaching conclusions. Over the course of a couple days I clicked it and even set a timer to time it. On the third day I set up a bitcoin wallet. This was the first time I had downloaded a bitcoin wallet to my laptop. Just for fun. I couldnā€™t output anything because the threshold for output was too high and I was itching to reach it, so I decided to materialize this day this way. After a few days, I immersed myself in learning about bitcoin. I ordered some books about it and received them at the delivery point when I returned to Russia. After I read them I was completely transformed. But that faucet made me feel a kind of excitement and I didnā€™t stop. But I realized that I donā€™t want to push that button myself anymore and that it distracts me from my daily activities, that simply the amount is not so great that I spend my time on it. So what did I do? What would you do? I thought, ā€œWait a minute! How did I find out about this on my own? Of course I did!ā€ And I bought self-adhesive paper at the store, and there were already notches for rectangles - 18 or 24 pieces, I donā€™t remember anymore. I printed on a color printer QR codes in these rectangles with my referral link, the Bitcoin logo and the prominent inscription ā€œGet your first bitcoin for free!ā€. That was five sheets. And for two weeks I traveled to a huge number of fast food outlets (where school kids and students usually hang out) and put these stickers in places where they could be seen, but hardly anyone would peel them off. Three months later, I had my own whole bitcoin. Two months later, another one. Itā€™s all about the network effect. Now just think about how many people I brought into Bitcoin, and how many people those people brought in after me if the payout amount was negligible. Thatā€™s the story of how the idea of bitcoin spread, among other things. Incentives and motivations play a key role in that. And then youā€™re already captured by the idea itself, and for me it was Ethereum, Monero and eventually Zcash.

So I think for this faucet idea to work well, we need two things:

First, a large enough dollar amount of funds that could get this thing going. And most likely this will happen when the price of ZEC will be two orders of magnitude higher and as a consequence the first zodlers will already be more generous. It is unlikely that we can afford the ZEC from the Devā€™s Fund for this.

And second: we need a referral program in the faucet. Without it, the network effect is impossible.

7 Likes