What is a federated single-guardian mint?

A federated single-guardian mint is managed by one guardian running four or more separate fedimint servers. This model represents a middle ground between federated and unfederated mints.

In this setup, one or more of the lone guardian’s servers can go offline or be otherwise compromised without affecting the mint, a significant improvement in resiliency over unfederated mints.

While these mints require less coordination to set up, the downside is that custody is not distributed across multiple parties, resulting in a single point of failure if the guardian acts maliciously.