What is a guardian?

Summary

A guardian is an individual who runs a fedimint server for a federation.

In Detail

By running their respective servers, guardians act as custodians – collaboratively securing federation assets for users and ensuring the continued operation of the federations they serve.

In self-hosted federations, which are technically complex to set up, guardians are typically known to one another and start the federation together – ensuring their fedimint servers successfully establish consensus.

Here, guardians only serve one federation they have a personal relationship to and vested interest in, but each guardian may run multiple servers for said federation.

In the current iteration of Manifold federations, guardians are not known to one another or to the federation ambassador but instead are verified through the Fedi app's implementation of the PeerBadge protocol.

A guardian runs the Manifold Fedimint Guardian application on their hardware and advertises seats (server capacity) to ambassadors anonymously. They typically advertise many seats, ie run many fedimint servers, but they can only run 1 server per federation.

In future iterations of Manifold, federation ambassadors will be able to select guardians they know personally to help them run their federations – accelerating the shift from collaborative custody to true community custody.