There have been a few discussions around Fedipool in the past. I explain how Radpool design is different from Fedipool. I also point out to how the Radpool network 1) can scale for providing payout variance reduction, and 2) provide a payout mechanism that provides unilateral exits.

Links to previous discussions on Fedipool

Now the comparison

Payout Mechanism

Radpool uses DLC contracts to payout miners from liquidity locked into the contracts by Mining Service Providers - the federation members in a way.

Fedipool pays out miners in ecash tokens, which can be used in the ecash economy, but to convert to BTC, the miner needs to get permission from the mint.

🤩 Radpool’s payout lets miners exit unilaterally

DKG and FROST

Fedipool bitcoin multisig to sign transactions as the federation. This limits the size of the federation to the largest multisig possible on chain. A larger federation is more resilient to centralisation pressures.

Radpool is built from the ground up with DKG and FROST, which lets the network make progress as long as a threshold number of parties are honest and functional. The design provides solutions for robust DKG and threshold signatures using optimisations to ROAST (mentioned in the paper itself).

🤩 Radpool uses robust DKG and TSS - scale with fault tolerance

Federation Membership

Fedimint uses federation where the members/guardians are trusted as the community model. I argue, this model of the federation member stiffles the growth of the network as the trust model allows the pool to grow only so much.

In Radpool, the membership of the federation is decided using the hashrate that each member’s miners bring to the pool. Also, a new member has to wait for two weeks before it can participate in the DKG or the threshold signature for the pool. This distributes trust across multiple parties who all benefit from the network making progress and staying honest. The only way to attack the pool is to to get 60% of the Radpool hashrate spread between multiple MSPs. See Membership for details.

🤩 Radpool uses PoW to prevent Sybil attack and reduce trust

Open Network

Again, given the Fedimint trust model, the federation is a closed federation, where members can only join if they are trusted by other parties.

Radpool’s federation is an open federation, where anyone can join the federation. In fact, Radpool provides the network effect that each additional miner or MSP makes Radpool more useful for everyone already on the network. So current Radpool MSPs are incentivized to let new members in.

🤩 Radpool benefits from Network Effects - More MSPs the Better for Everyone

Accounting

Fedipool will be a closed network, however, the share accounting can be made transparent and auditable. In this way, the two pools are similar. I want to point out that Radpool is an open federation and therefore the accounting information is freely available to anyone who connects to the federation. Think of MSPs as bittorrent seeds for the shares database.

🤩 Radpool freely provides access to share database. Fedipool can do this too.