Bitcoin O.G. Peter Todd has joined the MARA Foundation as lead maintainer of Slipstream, the miner’s personal Bitcoin mempool service.
Introduced by the inspiration on Thursday, the brand new position will see Todd chargeable for growing and operating the service.
Slipstream lets customers ship bitcoin transactions straight to MARA Pool, the corporate’s mining pool, with out going by way of Bitcoin’s public peer-to-peer community. It was helpful after hackers exploited Coldcard {hardware} wallets in July, stealing over $115 million in consumer funds.
As a result of transactions despatched by way of Slipstream keep personal till they’re confirmed in a block, the service helps to maintain key info hidden earlier than affirmation — defending publicity of their public keys.
“I most sit up for seeing what’s potential on Bitcoin — utilizing Slipstream as a proving floor for experimental growth and protocol innovation,” Todd stated.
MARA’s Slipstream first drew consideration in 2024 for publishing massive Ordinals inscriptions. Extra just lately it has been used for analysis tasks like Quantum Protected Bitcoin and Binohash, a approach to emulate covenants and not using a smooth fork.
Todd is a longtime Bitcoin Core contributor, who co-authored BIP 125 (replace-by-fee), created OpenTimestamps, and in 2024 launched Libre Relay, a Bitcoin Core fork with looser relay guidelines for non-standard transactions.
He argues that mempool coverage ought to comply with what the market needs miners to mine, quite than prohibit how individuals use Bitcoin.
