deploying.md

Setting up Federations

The preferred way to run Fedimint is with multiple guardian servers working together in a federation. Fedimint is built to be Byzantine Fault Tolerant, meaning it can continue functioning even if some guardians act maliciously. Specifically, a federation with 3m + 1 guardians can tolerate up to m malicious guardians. For example: • A federation with 4 guardians can handle 1 malicious guardian. • A federation with 7 guardians can handle 2 malicious guardians.

You can also run Fedimint in solo mode with just one guardian. While this is useful for testing or development, it is not recommended for real-world use since it lacks the resilience of a federation with multiple guardians.

To support Lightning payments, Fedimint requires a Lightning Gateway. This is a participant in the federation that swaps ecash for sending and receiving Lightning payments. Note that the Lightning Gateway is not a guardian—it’s an untrusted economic actor that interacts with the federation.

Target audience

Using an existing Fedimint federation as an user is easy and comes down to downloading a client application on a device like a phone.

Setting up and maintaining Federation is more challenging as it requires better understanding of its architecture and handling of its server side components.

In near future we expect many hosted Fedimint solutions, which should make setting up federations relatively easy.

Self-hosting your own federation is preferable. It is very similar to self-hosting any other software and requires some technical understanding in this area.

Overview

What federation really is are 4 or more Guardians independently running fedimintd node software.

A fedimintd setup requires:

• setting DNS domain
• prunned bitcoind node
• TLS termination software like caddy or nginx

In addition, a practical federation requires a Lightning Gateway to join the federation, and someone needs to set it up and run, though one gateway can join and server multiple federations.

A ln-gateway setup requires:

• an unprunned bitcoind node
• possibly setting up lightning node

Self-hosted solutions

Due to diverse nature of server-side software, it is impossible to come up with a single guide that would cover all scenarios. We are trying to create and maintain guides and solutions for variety of cases.

• ./docker directory - for information regarding Docker support.
• Fedimint NixOS Deployment Repo - an example template for setting up Fedimint using NixOS server.
• Fedimint Mutinynet Setup Guide - a detailed guide setting up both Fedimint and Lightning Gateway using docker.

Hosted solutions

• Clovyr hosted Fedimint
• Nodana hosted Fedimint

Help and support

For help please try Fedimint Github Discussions or #mint-ops channel on Fedimint's Discord server.