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Maintaining a Guardian

Once you've completed the setup ceremony and your Fedimint is up and running, your Guardian is basically on autopilot. You should monitor your Fedimint to ensure that it's healthy and online, but otherwise it doesn't require any interaction.

Future releases of Fedimint will allow guardians to take actions like update federation metadata, take guardian votes on updates and upgrades, etc, but for now the guardian dashboard is mostly informational.

The Fedimint consensus is Byzantine Fault Tolerant, meaning that it can tolerate up to 1/3 of the custodians being offline or compromised without affecting users. As a responsible Guardian though, you should monitor your Fedimint to ensure that it's healthy and online. Fedimint's included a few tools to help you do this.

You can use the invite code (string or QR code), listed on the dashboard to connect clients like Fedi to your federation after it's set up. Just scan or enter the code from Fedi.

Invite Code

The Guardian Dashboard​

Fedimint Guardian Dashboard

The Guardian Dashboard is the main interface for monitoring your Fedimint Guardian Node, and on Clovyr is the default interface (if you're running fedimint from docker this UI defaults to port :3000)

The Dashboard shows you:

  1. The status of your Guardian node and the other guardians in the federation
  2. Information known to the Guardians: consensus block height, Current reserves & liabilities, etc.
  3. A table of Lightning Gateways registered with the Fedimint. See the Lightning Gateway Guide for more details on how to help users spin up lightning gateways and connect them to your Fedimint.

Fedimint uses Chaumain Ecash to issue blinded claims against deposits. These claims are 1-1 representations of the deposits, and can be redeemed on-chain by the Fedimint. However, ecash accounting allows the user to maintain absolute privacy from the mint: the user's anonymity set for any notes they spend/withdraw in a transaction is the entire set of notes (of that denomination) ever issued by the Fedimint. This means that the Fedimint can't know how many notes are in circulation, or how many users are using the Fedimint. The Fedimint can only know the total reserves and liabilities of the Fedimint, and the total number of notes issued. This is a feature, not a bug, and is a core part of the Fedimint's privacy model.