PETER TODD JOINS THE MARA FOUNDATION AS LEAD MAINTAINER OF SLIPSTREAM — TRANSACTIONS GO STRAIGHT TO MARA POOL AND SKIP THE PUBLIC NETWORK — THE LIBRE RELAY AUTHOR WILL RUN IT

Peter Todd, a longtime Bitcoin Core contributor, has joined the MARA Foundation as lead maintainer of Slipstream, Bitcoin Magazine reported on October 1, 2026. Slipstream "lets users send bitcoin transactions straight to MARA Pool" without going through bitcoin's public peer-to-peer network. The transactions stay private until they are in a block.

Todd built Libre Relay, a Bitcoin Core fork with looser relay rules for non-standard transactions. He said: "Working with Slipstream is a natural complement to my work on Libre Relay, and my mempool policy work more broadly. I've always believed that Bitcoin is better when we design protocols with economic demand in mind." Bitcoin Magazine says Slipstream first drew attention in 2024 for publishing Ordinals inscriptions.

Here is the trade. A transaction sent through one pool's private lane stays out of sight until it is mined. It also means one company decides whether it gets in, and nobody else sees it waiting. The public mempool is how anyone, anywhere, gets a transaction in front of every miner at once.

If private lanes become the normal way to get unusual transactions mined, the rules stop being set by thousands of nodes and start being set by a few pool operators. Your keys still sign. Somebody else decides when it counts. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $84,467.