The DFINITY Foundation launched the Cycles Faucet in partnership with Fleek as a way to supercharge development on the Internet Computer blockchain and support our growing developer ecosystem. Qualified developers can access 20T worth of free cycles to begin deploying canister smart contracts to the network. Go to https://faucet.dfinity.org and authenticate with your Discord account (no longer through Twitter).

For detailed instructions, check out our support article on how to create a cycles wallet through the Cycles Faucet. 

The Cycles Faucet allows developers to skip conversion and deploy canisters in a few easy steps.

Upon accessing the Cycles Faucet, you will be able to select one of two options for managing your cycles (you will be prompted to input your principal identifier):

1. A cycles wallet, or
2. Dank, a service offered by Fleek.

A cycles wallet is a special type of canister for managing the distribution and ownership of cycles. It can load cycles, which can be used to create and register canisters. When using the DFINITY Canister SDK locally, a cycles wallet is created for you as part of the default dfx project, and most of the operations performed using the cycles wallet happen automatically. In order to deploy apps to production on the Internet Computer, you'll need to first create a canister and deploy a new cycles wallet to it. When selecting this option in the Cycles Faucet, this is all done for you. The principal identifier provided will be assigned as the controller of your new wallet canister, enabling you to deploy canisters using your cycles balance.

With Dank, you'll be offered the necessary canister and cycle management infrastructure in the background so that you won't need to deploy your own cycles wallet. Dank can even automatically keep your cycle balance topped up.

For more information and resources, please join Fleek's Discord and Dank's community on Discord, and check out our Developer Community.

Updated April 06, 2023 21:58