How To Get Free MATIC: Use a Faucet!
Use A Faucet To Get Free MATIC
People tend to bridge their stable coins or ETH over to Polygon and forget that they need MATIC tokens to pay for gas fees on the other side.
Just like ETH is required to pay for transactions on Ethereum, MATIC tokens are required to pay for transactions on Polygon.
If you don’t have any MATIC tokens in your Polygon wallet, then you can’t move funds once the bridge deposits your stable coins.
To avoid the stress, bridge your ERC20 MATIC tokens over to Polygon first. Once your MATIC tokens have been bridged over, you’ll have native MATIC tokens to pay for transactions. THEN bridge your stable coins, or other tokens over to Polygon.
Or, simply buy from fiat using Coinbase, Binance, Binance.us, Kraken, or another centralized exchange. After you’ve bought a few MATIC tokens be sure to withdraw to the Polygon network.
Please resist the urge to stake your tokens with a centralized exchange. It’s expensive, exposes you to extra risk, and is terrible for the blockchain networks.
Want to know more? Check out the article: Why You Should Not Stake ATOM On Coinbase.
If centralized exchanges aren’t your thing, the Polygon bridge can be used as Plasma, or Proof-Of-Stake. There is a difference.
The PoS bridge is much faster and less expensive, so use PoS if you can. For a complete description of both bridges and tutorials on how to use them, see the official documentation here.
The official bridge is between Polygon and Ethereum. It only supports ERC20 MATIC because the network is layer 2 and is built on top of Ethereum.
If your MATIC tokens are on Binance Chain you can move them to Binance.com and withdraw directly to the Polygon network from there.
Binance has randomly suspended withdrawals to Polygon network, so check before you move your tokens there.
If your MATIC tokens are on Binance Chain and you don’t have access to Binance.com, then you’re out of luck. Remember that Binance and Polygon are competing chains, so they don’t always play nice.
Stable coins on Binance Chain can usually be bridged over to Polygon network using services, like AnySwap, Evodefi or Connext.
REMEMBER, you must have MATIC tokens on Polygon mainnet to pay for transactions. Your stable coins will be stuck if you bridge them over without having native MATIC tokens in your Polygon wallet.
If you’re still stuck after bridging funds and need MATIC for gas, you’re in luck! There are a few options.
Network fees on Polygon are cheap. 1 MATIC token can pay for around 100 transactions. There are several faucets that distribute MATIC tokens for free.
You can use a MATIC faucet, or do a gasless swap. We’ll discuss both below.
What is a cryptocurrency faucet?
A cryptocurrency faucet: is a website that gives away small amounts of crypto for free. They only distribute fractions of a single token, so that you can start using the network without buying the token needed for gas.
“Gas” is the transaction fee to move funds on a blockchain.
Projects use faucets to help onboard new users. These faucets are usually officially sponsored by either the network itself or a partner application, like a decentralized exchange.
Faucets can run out of tokens, so we’ll provide links to several in this article.
Get 0.001 free MATIC by connecting your wallet to Polygon Network
This one is as easy as it gets. Please know that you receive 0.001 free MATIC for simply connecting your wallet to the Polygon network.
We’re not sure how people miss this. They freak out and ask strangers to please send them 1 MATIC token. You’ll find people begging for MATIC to pay for gas on Telegram and Reddit.
If you’ve already connected your Metamask wallet to the Polygon blockchain, then you received a small deposit of 0.001 MATIC to help you pay for gas. Link your wallet to the Polygon dashboard.
If that didn’t work for you, let’s move on to the next option.
Get 0.01 free MATIC by joining the Polygon Discord and requesting it from the faucet bot
The official Polygon faucet will direct you to Discord, so…..
Join the Polygon Discord and after verifying navigate to the “support.” Underneath the “support” tab there are 10 or so different channels. One of those channels is called, “matic-faucet.”
Paste the message “faucet-send YourReceivingAddress” without the quotation marks. Within a couple minutes you will receive 0.01 MATIC.
This will not work if you have any MATIC in your wallet.
BEWARE of anyone who sends you a direct message, offering to help. Polygon support will NEVER DM you first, ever!
If you received a DM from someone claiming to be Polygon support or offering to help you, report them immediately to Discord.
Get 0.001 free MATIC at Firebird Finance
Firebird Finance is a DeFi project on Polygon. They offer token trading, farming, the ability to contribute to liquidity pools and a few staking options.
- Visit their faucet at https://faucet.firebird.finance/
- Checkmark the captcha box to prove you are human
- Connect your Metamask or other web 3.0 wallet to their website
- You’ll see that it automatically imports your wallet’s receiving address
- Click “receive”
- Within a few seconds you should see a deposit of .001 MATIC
Now that you have a little MATIC to pay for gas, use the “swap” feature at Firebird Finance to trade your stable coin for some MATIC. You’ll then have the funds to pay for thousands of transactions on Polygon and hopefully won’t have to worry about this ever again.
Get 0.001 free MATIC at Mac N Cheese Finance
MacNCheese.Finance is a DeFi project built on Polygon. Despite having a silly name, it’s an ambitious project with a long term vision of bringing users to the network. So, they have a Polygon faucet.
- Visit their faucet here: https://macncheese.finance/matic-polygon-mainnet-faucet.php
- Copy your Metamask receiving address while connected to the Polygon blockchain. That’s the string of letters and numbers at the top of your Metamask wallet. It says, “Copy to clipboard” when you hover over it with a cursor.
- Paste that Polygon mainnet wallet address into the bar at the top of the Mac N Cheese faucet page and press “enter.”
- Within a few seconds you should see your MATIC balance increase by 0.001
Now you have enough MATIC to pay for a few transactions. This is the time to get more MATIC tokens. Swap a few stable coins or ETH for some.
Use a decentralized exchange (DEX) to swap the tokens you just bridged over for MATIC mainnet tokens. Check out Firebird Finance, QuickSwap, SushiSwap, Curve Finance, or Wault Finance.
Get free MATIC using the Coinbase Earn program
The Coinbase Earn program allows users to earn free tokens by watching a few short videos and answering a quiz question or two. It’s not a faucet, but is a way to get free MATIC tokens nonetheless.
The Earn program changes from time to time, so this option may or may not be available.
Bear in mind, the MATIC tokens you get from the Coinbase Earn program will be ERC20, not mainnet tokens so you’ll have to bridge them over to Polygon using the POS bridge mentioned at the top of this article.
Remember that you must have ETH in your wallet to use the bridge.
Now you know how to use a faucet to get some free MATIC.
Do a gasless swap
If none of the faucets work, our best suggestion would be to do a gasless swap. The Polygon developers added this feature recently and it allows you to swap stable coins for MATIC for free.
You can avoid all this by simply bridging your MATIC tokens over to Polygon first. Then bridge your stable coins and other tokens over.
If you plan to HODL your MATIC tokens for the long term, use them to generate passive portfolio income.
Stake your MATIC tokens with Blocks United and earn around 4.5%. Check out our MATIC staking tutorial.
But before you do, are you setup on a Ledger? If not, check out our guide on Staking from Ledger.
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