Bitcoin Miner Marathon to Start 'Slipstream' to Make Complex BTC Transactions Faster

Bitcoin miner Marathon Digital (MARA) to roll out Slipstream - a new offering that will help expedite the processing of complex transactions.

Slipstream will make the confirmation of large or "non-standard" bitcoin transactions easier, cutting out the delay and complication users often face during such process, the company said in a press release. If a complex transaction meets Marathon's minimum fee threshold and conforms to the network's consensus rules, the miner will add the transaction to the members pool or mempool for mining, the miner said. Mempools are essentially waiting rooms for Bitcoin transactions.

"By default, Bitcoin nodes frequently exclude large and non-standard transactions from Bitcoin’s mempool, even if these transactions adhere to the Bitcoin network’s consensus rules," said Marathon. "As a result, complex Bitcoin transactions are often delayed or unprocessed. To encourage experimentation and development on Bitcoin and to enable and expedite the processing of large or complex transactions that comply with Bitcoin’s protocol, Marathon has launched Slipstream."

Marathon will be the first publicly traded mining company to offer such a product and be able to do so, given that it owns its own mining pool - MARA Pool. "Because it is the only publicly traded Bitcoin mining company that operates its own mining pool, Marathon is also the only known publicly traded Bitcoin miner currently capable of offering such services," the company said. As Marathon can operate as the sole miner in its own mining pool, the company says it's able to customize its pool's settings to accept more "diverse" transactions.

However, such customization brings the question of censoring user transactions. The topic has been hotly debated recently, as some mining pools have been accused of censoring. Marathon said that transactions submitted through Slipstream will be subject to certain terms of service, which "prohibit unauthorized copyrighted material and objectionable material."

Read more: Bitcoin's Anti-Censorship Ethos Surfaces After Mining Pool F2Pool Acknowledges 'Filter'

The need for such service exists as other mining pools currently don't offer similar products "in a standardized, accessible manner," the company said in a separate statement. Some pools may accept these transactions, but those often happen through channels such as email or direct messaging on social media platforms, Marathon added.

"Marathon is uniquely capable of offering these services because of our scale, our mining pool, and our team’s technological expertise. We believe Slipstream is mutually beneficial for the industry and for our organization," said Fred Thiel, Marathon’s chairman and CEO.

The miner has been actively experimenting on its mining pool, which hasn't always gone smoothly. Last year, Marathon mined an invalid block due to an unexpected bug, which raised some questions among the community members as to the security of the network. However, the event was cited by Marathon as an example of the resilience of the Bitcoin network.

Read more: Bitcoin Miner Marathon Confirms Mining Invalid BTC Block Due to a Bug