I've been using the Pelion Banano faucet for nearly a year now to claim some free BAN. It's a daily claim, which is my favourite type of faucet, and you can redeem (that is, withdraw) your claimed crypto as soon as you've accumulated one Banano or more.

The claims start off tiny, sometimes as little as one Banoshi per day (and there are 100 Banoshi in a Banano):

But after every 30 days of claims, you 'level up' and increase the minimum size of all future claims. I was able to redeem my first Banano after 43 days, my second after 66 days, my third after 91 days and so on - getting quicker each time. So you need a lot of patience to begin with, but there's potential to earn some decent Banano in the long run.

I recently reached level 11 and was making great progress:

Then calamity struck! When I tried to redeem my Banano this week, I got the following error:

Failed to redeem banano: Unexpected error: Unexpected character encountered while parsing value: e. Path '', line 0, position 0.

A lot of free faucets do go dry or break, so I thought this was the end of the road for Pelion. But more out of hope than expectation, I messaged them using the contact form on the website to flag the error. To my surprise, they came back the following day with this reply:

We investigated the issue and found that there is an issue with our connection to a Banano node on the network. We are working to find a resolution to this issue. You can still make Claims to the faucet and maintain your existing streak bonuses, but the Redeem function will not be available until we can resolve the issue.

Thank you for reporting this issue to us. If you're comfortable with sharing your Banano address, we'd be happy to send you a small amount of Banano as a reward.

How nice is that! The professionalism of the reply gives me confidence that the faucet will be restored, so for the time being I'll continue making daily claims (albeit without being able to withdraw my accumulated Banano).

Want to know whether I receive my reward and whether the faucet redeem option gets fixed? Keep your eyes peeled for my next update...