Your first testnet transaction

Time to move actual (play-money) DOGE. In this lesson you'll receive coins from a faucet, watch confirmations arrive in real time, send coins back out, and dissect the result like a developer – the full lifecycle every payment feature is built on.

Step 1: Get funded

Generate a fresh receiving address on your testnet node and give it to a faucet (current faucets are listed around r/dogecoindev):

$ dogecoin-cli getnewaddress
nfLKxjXXfW3JCkCTvyU2VqCbFy8uHkNkNo   <- yours will differ

Step 2: Watch the payment arrive

Within a minute or two of the faucet sending, your wallet sees the transaction. Poll it:

$ dogecoin-cli listtransactions
[
  {
    "account": "",
    "address": "nfLKxjX...",
    "category": "receive",
    "amount": 100.00000000,
    "confirmations": 0,          <- in the mempool, not yet mined
    "txid": "b17f0a3c9d4e..."
  }
]

Run it again a minute later and confirmations ticks up: 1, 2, 3... Each number is another block mined on top of the one containing your transaction – the "settling concrete" from the transactions lesson, visible live. Meanwhile:

$ dogecoin-cli getbalance
0.00000000                       <- unconfirmed funds don't count yet
$ dogecoin-cli getbalance "*" 0  # include 0-conf
100.00000000
$ dogecoin-cli getbalance        # after a confirmation
100.00000000

Step 3: Send some back

Faucets usually publish a return address (be a good citizen – testnet coins are a shared resource). Sending is one call; the wallet picks UTXOs, computes the fee, and creates change automatically:

$ dogecoin-cli sendtoaddress "nFaucetReturnAddr..." 25
77ac9e5d21c4b8f0...              <- the new transaction's txid

Or from Python, with the wrapper from the quickstart:

txid = rpc.call("sendtoaddress", "nFaucetReturnAddr...", 25.0)
print("sent, txid:", txid)

Step 4: Read the transaction like a developer

$ dogecoin-cli gettransaction 77ac9e5d21c4b8f0...
{
  "amount": -25.00000000,
  "fee": -0.00226000,            <- fraction of a DOGE, sized by bytes
  "confirmations": 1,
  "details": [ { "category": "send", "amount": -25.0, ... } ],
  ...
}

Now decode the raw transaction and find your change:

$ dogecoin-cli getrawtransaction 77ac9e5d21c4b8f0... 1
{
  "vin":  [ { "txid": "b17f0a3c...", "vout": 0, ... } ],   <- spent the faucet's 100
  "vout": [
    { "value": 25.0,        ... },   <- the payment
    { "value": 74.99774,    ... }    <- change back to your wallet
  ]
}

There is the whole UTXO story in one object: the 100-DOGE note was spent in full – 25 to the recipient, ~74.998 back to you as change, and the 0.00226 difference is the miner's fee. You can also paste the txid into a public explorer like Blockchair (switch it to testnet) to see the same data as the rest of the world sees it.