Ethereum Faucets | Are They Worth It?

• The Search
• My Experience
• My Thoughts

If you’d like to own some Ethereum but don’t have enough money to purchase any or buy a mining rig, you may be interested in using an Ethereum faucet. Faucets reward users with free Ethereum for a variety of tasks. The sites then use some of the ad revenue that they receive to continue to fund the faucet with more Ethereum.

The Search

Honestly, these types of websites make my “scam” senses tingle, but I decided to give one a go anyway. I began my experiment with a search for a well-known, reputable faucet to try out. After reading through a few Reddit, Quora, and Bitcointalk forums, it became clear that this wasn’t going to be a successful search.

Several people reported that there used to be a website that hosted multiple faucets, epay.info, but was exposed as a scam and has since shut down. Not a good start.

Without finding a single comment positively endorsing a faucet, I decided to go with ethereumfaucet.info. It had everything I was looking for right there in the website name.

My Experience

I navigated to the website and was immediately told that my ad blocker has got to go. I understand that ads are at the core of their business model, but I was still turned off by the required step.

I turned off my ad blocker, reloaded the page, and bam! I’m hit with more banner ads than a Russian streaming website. Avoiding the temptation to “double [my] Bitcoin in 24 hour”, I scrolled down and clicked the input box to enter my Ethereum wallet address.

Pop-up. The real faucet page opened in a new tab while the page I was originally on became an ad for a Bitcoin faucet. I guess they think that if you’re willing to try one, you’ll be willing enough to try them all.

I exited out of the ad and navigated to the new faucet page. Let’s try this again.

Scroll. Click… Pop-up. At least they had the courtesy to open the ad in a new window this time. Once again, I closed the ad and attempted to enter my Ethereum address into the faucet.

Third time’s a charm. I successfully entered my wallet address and continued without hitting any advertising booby traps.

My reward for successfully using the faucet? 0.000002 ETH. That’s five “0”s and roughly equals $0.0007. Who am I to complain, though? Money is money. Let’s cash out and get on with our lives.

Originally, I thought that the Ethereum would automatically be transferred from the faucet to my wallet. That would be too easy.

Instead, there’s a minimum threshold you need to hit before you receive your Ethereum. For this faucet, the minimum amount needed to cash out is 0.0025 ETH.

Let’s do some math:

The entire process took me about 10 seconds to complete.

I received 0.000002 ETH for my time. Assuming I receive this amount every time, I would need to complete the process:

0.0025 / 0.000002 = 1250 times just to be able to cash out. This would take me:

1250 * 10 = 12500 seconds or almost 3 and a half hours.

All this work would net me a grand total of $0.83. Less than a dollar!

My Thoughts

Stay as far away from Ethereum faucets as you can. Even programming a bot to do the process for you wouldn’t be worth your time.