May 16, 2026

State of testnets: from faucets to developer tooling

A first note for the POC: testnet.help should evolve from a classic faucet into a status, tooling and debugging hub.


The old model was simple: developers needed test tokens, and a faucet distributed them.

That model is weaker now. Public faucets are abused, rate-limited, protected by accounts, or moved behind official project flows. The useful product is no longer just giving tokens.

The useful product is helping developers answer:

  • which faucet still works?
  • what requirements does it have?
  • is the network healthy?
  • what RPC should I try?
  • why did my test transaction fail?

First POC scope

This first iteration deliberately avoids accounts, wallets and databases.

Markdown posts
+
mock faucet list
+
server-rendered NestJS pages

Next useful feature

The next feature should probably be:

Explain failed transaction

Input:

chain + tx hash

Output:

human explanation + likely fix + explorer links

That is more useful than yet another token faucet.