Key Points
Marathon Digital Holdings, a leading publicly traded Bitcoin mining company, has announced the roll-out of a new service named Slipstream. This product is designed to hasten the processing of complex, non-standard Bitcoin transactions by enabling users to submit them to Marathon’s own mining pool – Mara Pool.
Non-standard transactions are those that comply with Bitcoin’s consensus rules but contain elements not commonly found in regular transactions. These could include additional metadata like memos or use complex transaction types like ordinals. Despite being valid, these transactions are often left out from the mempools (memory pool) of standard Bitcoin nodes, resulting in delays or rejection.
Slipstream: A New Way to Process Bitcoin Transactions
Slipstream offers a straightforward and transparent method for users to submit permissible non-standard transactions to Mara Pool. Marathon, by managing its own pool, can tailor the settings to readily accept a broader range of transaction types. The company anticipates that the new service will be beneficial to advanced Bitcoin users who wish to explore the protocol’s capabilities.
Fred Thiel, the Chairman and CEO of Marathon, states that Slipstream promotes innovation in BTC by providing developers and entrepreneurs a reliable platform for adding complex transactions to the blockchain. Additionally, Marathon generates extra revenue through transaction fees paid by users who use Slipstream.
Despite the positive reception of Slipstream, concerns have been raised about potential censorship when a single entity has the power to decide which transactions are included. Marathon has responded to these concerns, stating that all transactions will be scrutinized in accordance with relevant laws and terms of service. This includes rules against copyright infringement, illegal content, and other prohibited uses.
It’s worth noting that Marathon has previously faced criticism for issues related to bugs in its mining pool. Last year, an error led the company to mine an invalid block, raising concerns about Bitcoin’s security. However, Marathon later cited this event on their X platform as evidence that the network can withstand failures by individual miners.
Looking forward, Marathon intends to enhance Slipstream’s capabilities to further support innovation on the Bitcoin protocol. Thiel is enthusiastic about helping developers, entrepreneurs, and companies build on top of Bitcoin. If successful, Slipstream could facilitate more advanced types of transactions and applications without contradicting Bitcoin’s core principles of transparency, neutrality, and resistance to censorship.
