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 guardian’s servers can go offline or be otherwise compromised without affecting the mint, a significant resilience improvement over unfederated mints.

While these mints are also simple to set up, the downside is that trust is not distributed across multiple parties, resulting in a single point of failure in case the guardian becomes malicious.