[fraseragain]

Problem

A brand-new Studio account on production has a testnet payment account with a balance of 0 (Account 'cheqd1…' does not exist on chain), so Studio's own DID and resource calls fail with a 500 until the user requests tokens from the faucet. The sign-up top-up the docs describe never happens.

Cause

56d3f25 (in 3.18.0) made the initial top-up run only for a newly created testnet account:

const isNewTestnetAccount = !accounts.some((acc) => acc.namespace === CheqdNetwork.Testnet);

CustomerService.create already creates the customer's default testnet payment account, before bootstrap (and POST /account/create) read the accounts. So for a new sign-up the testnet account always exists, the flag is always false, and topupTestnet returns without doing anything. The existing tests only call topupTestnet directly with the flag set.

What changed

• New isNewTestnetAccount(customerCreatedNow, hadTestnetAccount) in src/helpers/testnet-topup.ts. It is true when the call created the customer, or when the testnet account didn't exist.
• bootstrap sets customerCreatedNow at both places it creates a customer. create sets it when there is no customer on the request.
• Later calls for the same customer still don't top up again: the customer exists, and so does its testnet account.

How to test

• npm run test:unit: new tests/unit/account/testnet-topup.test.ts (3 tests), including the case that was broken. All 24 suites and 216 tests pass, and tsc --noEmit exits 0.
• On staging after deploy: sign up a new account, then GET /account/balances. The testnet balance should be 10,000 CHEQ, and faucet.quota.used should show 10,000.

Notes

• Not covered by an automated test here: the full sign-up path needs Postgres and a LogTo webhook, so the integration tests are skipped without a database.
• Accounts created since 3.18.0 (14 October) never got the top-up. They need a one-off top-up, or can use Balances & Faucet themselves. A read-only way to find them: customers created since 2026-10-12 with no faucetRequest row.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[fraseragain]

Closing: we decided accounts should not be topped up automatically on sign-up, because people may want to fund an external wallet instead. New users will be told to request testnet CHEQ on the dashboard, and the sign-up top-up code is being removed instead (follow-up PR).