Your first testnet transaction

What you will do #

This is the short, no-stress path through a full transaction. In four steps you will:

• Make a testnet wallet in your browser.
• Claim some free coins from a faucet.
• Send a transaction and pay a small fee.
• Watch it get confirmed on a block explorer.

Budget about 15 minutes. Every coin you touch here is worthless test money, so there is no way to lose anything real. If a step feels slow, that is normal for testnet and part of what it teaches you.

1. Make a testnet wallet #

Open TestnetWallet (testnetwallet.net). It runs in your browser, so there is nothing to download. Choose to create a new wallet and let it generate a fresh one for you.

It will show you a seed phrase, a list of words that backs up this wallet. Write it down or save it somewhere just for testnet. This is a brand-new throwaway wallet, so anything you generate here is fine to use.

Want the longer walkthrough with pictures? See the full wallet guide.

2. Get some coins #

A fresh wallet starts empty. To fill it, you claim from a faucet, a free service that hands out testnet coins so people have something to practice with.

In your wallet, copy your receive address. Then open CypherFaucet (cypherfaucet.com), pick the coin you want, paste your address, and request coins.

The coins do not arrive instantly. The faucet sends a transaction, and you wait for the network to pick it up. Give it a few minutes and your wallet balance will appear. Full details are in the faucet guide.

3. Send a transaction #

Now spend some of it. You need somewhere to send to. Two easy options:

• Create a second address in your own wallet and send to yourself.
• Or send to a friend who also has a testnet address.

In TestnetWallet, choose Send, paste the destination address, and enter an amount. You will also pick a fee, a small extra amount that pays a miner to include your transaction. On testnet a low fee is fine. If you are unsure what to pick, read how fees work.

Press send to broadcast the transaction to the network. The wallet will show you a txid (transaction id), a long string that uniquely names your transaction. Copy it. You will need it in the next step.

4. Watch it confirm #

Open TestnetScan (testnetscan.com) and paste your txid into the search box. You will see your transaction, first as unconfirmed, then with a confirmation count that climbs as new blocks are mined on top of it.

Each new block adds one confirmation. The first one means your transaction made it into a block and is now part of the chain. Testnet timing is bumpy, so confirmations may arrive in a burst or stall for a bit. Learn to read what you are seeing in the explorer guide and how confirmations work.

What just happened #

You just did the whole thing end to end. Here is how the pieces fit together:

• Your wallet held your keys, and those keys are what let you spend. That is all a wallet really is. See keys, seeds, and backups.
• When you sent coins, you spent unspent outputs and got change back, the way physical cash works when you hand over a bill and get change. See how UTXOs work.
• The fee paid a miner to include your transaction in a block. See how fees work.
• Each new block added a confirmation, making your transaction harder to undo. See how confirmations work.

From here you can dig into any of those ideas, explore the Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Monero testnets, or browse all the guides to keep going.