Why the Tezos Foundation is giving away XTZ tokens

The Tezos Foundation earlier this week released the “Tezos Foundation’s Faucet,” available to everyone with a Tezos wallet. Enter your Tezos wallet address and complete the ReCaptcha puzzle to join a queue, whereupon you’ll receive up to 0.01 XTZ every 12 hours, currently worth $0.0148—down almost 90 percent from its all-time high of nearly $11 per coin.

Up to 10 Tezos addresses can receive the funds from the faucet at any one time, and those who’ve received Tezos tokens from the faucet are blocked for 12 hours before they’re re-added.

According to the Foundation’s announcement, the faucet is aimed at developers and intended for “testing purposes.”

Development faucets are nothing new, but it’s rare that they’re used to disburse real funds; usually, they’re reserved for dishing out testnet tokens. (Decrypt has reached out to the Foundation for further comment, and will update accordingly.)

Given its paltry payout, it’s unlikely that anyone should expect to get rich from this, and the Tezos Foundation advises that “no one,” not even the developers it was intended for, “should depend on this faucet’s continued availability.” Tezos reserves the right to “turn off or change the faucet’s parameters in the future.”

Still, it’s a sweet deal for anyone interested in trying out some tezzies, but maybe not as sweet as airdrops, where cryptocurrency companies straight-up give users digital currencies for nothing. Coinbase and Blockchain.com have given away a combined total of around $250 million worth of Stellar Lumens (XLM) over the past few years, and Bancor gave some of its users $2.6 million in a new token, BNT, at the start of the month.

Either way, as the Tezos faucet website warns, “drink responsibly!”