Can guardians steal from their federations?

Federating custody across multiple individual guardians creates a more resilient, anti-fragile system by ensuring that no single guardian can steal assets from, commonly known as "rug pull", their federation.

That said, while no one guardian can steal from a federation on their own, it is technically possible for a federation to be rug pulled by a super majority of malicious guardians colluding to steal funds.

This super majority depends on the size of the federation and is determined by the same Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus model that is required to keep a federation running and processing transactions.

For this reason, it is critically important that you use federations in direct proportion to your level of trust in them. See How do I know which federations I can trust? for ways to evaluate federation trustworthiness.