FEDIMINT GOT A SECOND GUARDIAN CODEBASE — ITS OWN RECORD SAYS IT HAS ONLY MOVED TEST COINS

On September 30 at Ecash Hackday in Berlin, Fedimint developers ran one federation on more than one codebase. That is the account in a Bitcoin Magazine guest post published October 6 by Obi Nwosu, who the post names as co-founder of Fedi and Fedimint. The goal is sound. If every guardian runs the same code, one bug can hit every guardian at once. Nwosu sums up Matt Corallo's point as "run the same software, suffer the same bugs."

Only one of the new codebases is public. Eric Sirion's minimint-ng, posted to GitHub on September 30, is a guardian written from a spec instead of from Fedimint's own source. Its status page says a federation of two minimint-ng guardians and two standard ones, three of four needed to sign, took deposits, moved notes between users and paid out withdrawals, with each guardian taken offline in turn. Every one of those runs was on regtest, a private test chain whose coins are worth nothing. The project says the work is complete "at the recorded regtest scope."

The project is plain about the limits. Its results page says the tests do not prove "production readiness," and the guardian does not yet advertise the core client API. The spec it was built from was pulled out of Fedimint's code on September 9, and that spec warns it "is not a claim that independent implementations have interoperated." I could not find a public repository for the third codebase the post credits to thesimplekid.

This is the checkable way to do it. A written spec, a second guardian built only from that spec, and published test records with transaction ids anyone can recheck. The guest post says the Berlin federation was "holding funds together." It does not say on which chain, and the only public record shows test coins. Federated custody gets safer when the second codebase holds real coins in public, not before. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $85,511.