Every month, the Celo Foundation Developer Relations’ “Proof of Ship” virtual hackathon provides mentorship and rewards for builders leveraging key protocols and infrastructure across the Celo ecosystem. Self was proud to support Proof of Ship #6, with a partner track that helped builders worldwide create applications leveraging the Self SDK. In total, 45 Proof of Ship projects submitted for the Self track, finding unique ways to leverage Self’s privacy-preserving ZK proof-of-humanity and identity solutions for their novel use case. 

Web3 founder and community builder John Adekunjo and smart contract developer Jeremiah Oyeniyan worked together during Proof of Ship to create Faucet Drops, a lightweight Web3 tool designed to simplify and automate token distribution. They built Faucet Drops to make sending tokens directly to users easier, faster, and gasless to improve event onboarding, community rewards, and app testing. 

Faucets are especially susceptible to bots and bad actors claiming outsized supply, reducing the amount available to real, human users who are looking to build or onboard to a community. Google Cloud recognizes this challenge as well, partnering with Self to enhance sybil-resistance of their Web3 testnet faucet. 

This is also why John and Jeremiah integrated Self, ensuring that Faucet Drops could provide verified, real humans with the tokens that bots are often grabbing in large quantities. 

John and Jeremiah discussed their motivation for building Faucet Drops, why Self’s ZK-powered identity layer was a key integration, and more with the Self team. 

What inspired you to develop Faucet Drops?

Our inspiration is not far-fetched; we saw a gap in the onboarding experience in Web3. During blockchain events, hackathons, and community campaigns, teams wanted to give out tokens, but there were too many hurdles: exhaustion from manually sending tokens to tens/hundreds of wallets, rewards mistakenly sent multiple times, bots gaming the system, and lack of traceability.

Faucet Drops was born to simplify this process, making it easier for organizers to onboard users with instant token access, while preserving accountability, scalability and ease of use.

On the users' part, many newcomers to Web3 rarely get the chance to truly interact with dApps - most just drop a wallet address and receive tokens passively. With Faucet Drops, we set out to change that, creating an inclusive onboarding experience where even first-timers can actively claim rewards on-chain, interact with a real dApp, and feel the impact of participation. This hands-on experience makes their first encounter more memorable and encourages deeper exploration of Web3. We're not just distributing tokens, we're creating that “aha!” moment for new users.

When did you decide identity verification was a core pillar necessary to solve for?

As we scaled, we quickly realized that unrestricted access to token claims could be abused. In test runs, we saw users bypassing fair claim limits and gaming the system by creating multiple wallets to claim tokens. This undermined the credibility of our solution and the intentions behind many airdrop campaigns. It became clear: without identity as a foundational layer, true fairness and impact would be impossible. So we began to prioritize verifiable uniqueness and personhood - not just wallet addresses.

Why did you choose Self for the identity layer?

Honestly, Self was just exactly what we needed.

Two things were critical for us: our users' privacy and onboarding speed, and Self ticked both boxes. With Self, we're confident of a seamless user experience, meaning people could verify themselves in under a minute - crucial for live events and pop-up campaigns. Self gave us exactly what we needed, and we didn't have to compromise UX to get strong sybil resistance.

What’s your vision for the future of Faucet Drops?

We envision Faucet Drops as the infrastructure backbone for Web3 community activation - a system where people can earn, learn, and engage meaningfully through verified participation. In the future, every protocol, DAO, or community will be able to use Faucet Drops to grow and retain users with confidence, knowing that each drop of token claimed is real, fair, and measurable. We’re building toward a future where token distribution is not just easier, but smarter, and identity plays a central role in making that happen.

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