Todd Takes the Helm at MARA's Slipstream Private Mempool Service

Peter Todd, a longtime Bitcoin Core contributor, has joined the MARA Foundation as the lead maintainer of Slipstream, a miner's private Bitcoin mempool service. This move comes after Todd's recent work on Libre Relay, a Bitcoin Core fork with looser relay rules for non-standard transactions. With his experience, Todd will be responsible for developing and running Slipstream, which allows users to send bitcoin transactions directly to MARA Pool without going through the public peer-to-peer network. This service is useful for keeping key information hidden until transactions are confirmed in a block, protecting exposure of public keys. Todd expressed his enthusiasm for using Slipstream as a proving ground for experimental development and protocol innovation.

Slipstream has been used in various research projects, including Quantum Safe Bitcoin and Binohash, a way to emulate covenants without a soft fork. Todd argued that mempool policy should follow what the market wants miners to mine, rather than restrict how people use Bitcoin. The service drew attention in 2024 for publishing large Ordinals inscriptions, and it has been used in recent research projects.