Signet

Signet is a Bitcoin test network (BIP-325) where blocks are produced on a regular schedule by a designated block signer rather than by competitive mining. It's the test environment for serious protocol and wallet development.

What Signet fixes vs testnet:

• Predictable block times. Signet blocks come every ~10 minutes consistently. No 20-minute droughts followed by 30 blocks in 5 minutes.
• No spam-driven difficulty wars. The signer controls block production; there's nothing to spam.
• Realistic-feeling fee market. With predictable blocks, you can actually test fee estimation and congestion behavior in a way that's hard on chaotic testnet.

What Signet trades for that stability:

• The signer is a trusted role. It's appropriate for a test network, but a real attacker controlling the signer could disrupt Signet trivially. The default Signet has a known signer; you can run your own Signet with your own signer if you want a controlled environment.
• Coins are still worthless. It's a test network; Signet BTC has no economic value.

Custom Signets are increasingly common. A team can spin up their own signer, distribute the network's magic parameters, and have a fully-controlled test environment with whatever block-production cadence they want. This is the default for protocol-development work like Taproot, Drivechains experimentation, and Lightning protocol-spec testing.

For most everyday wallet development, the default Signet is fine. For weird edge-case testing, run your own. See Testnet for the older, less-controlled alternative and Mainnet for the real thing.