June 11, 2010
Once upon a time, five bitcoins were free.
Before Bitcoin was a household name, using it meant finding your way into a small and curious community. Getting a handful of coins to experiment with could be awkward. Gavin Andresen decided to do something about that.
For his first Bitcoin coding project, he built a website that gave coins away. He stocked it with 1,100 BTC and offered five bitcoins per person. It was called the Bitcoin Faucet.
“Five ฿ per customer, first come first served”
Gavin Andresen · Original announcement, June 2010
Visitors entered a receiving address. The community donated coins to keep the faucet supplied. Its purpose was straightforward: give people something to try, and a reason to understand Bitcoin.
That original faucet is a piece of internet history now. You can still visit an archived snapshot and see how small the page was.
A new chapter
The idea keeps flowing.
FAUCET revisits the spirit of distribution with a different mechanism. On its verified FAUCET/WBTC markets, a 3% holder reward fee funds distributions to eligible holders. The asset received is Wrapped BTC (Wormhole) on Solana.
The ledger records what was actually distributed. A wallet lookup records what actually arrived. And the forum gives the community a place to talk about it.
| The original faucet | The FAUCET community |
|---|---|
| Five BTC per person at launch | Variable WBTC rewards for eligible holders |
| Funded by Gavin and donations | Funded by eligible trading activity |
| Native Bitcoin | WBTC (Wormhole) on Solana |
| Try Bitcoin for the first time | Follow a new distribution experiment |
This is an independent community project. Gavin Andresen, Satoshi Nakamoto, and the original Bitcoin Faucet are not affiliated with it.