Marathon Digital Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: MARA) has found a way to streamline confirmations of large or otherwise non-standard Bitcoin transactions.
The company announced that it launched the direct Bitcoin transaction submission Slipstream on Monday.
This program finds a way around one of the key scalability issues surrounding the Bitcoin blockchain. In this case, Bitcoin nodes will often exclude large or non-standard transactions from Bitcoin’s transaction queue. The consequence is that some Bitcoin transactions are delayed or unprocessed beyond the 10-minute block clearance threshold. Slipstream fixes that.
Marathon powers Slipstream through the company’s proprietary mining pool. The program streamlines confirmations by allowing users to directly submit their transactions to Marathon.
The company adds these transactions to its collective pool of existing transactions and processes them accordingly, provided they adhere to the Bitcoin protocol and have paid the fees.
Marathon is the first Bitcoin mining company to offer a direct transaction submission service. Being the only publicly traded Bitcoin mining company that operates its own mining pool, Marathon stands out as the sole publicly traded Bitcoin miner currently capable of providing such services.
Most direct transaction services are highly rudimentary, according to Fred Thiel, Marathon’s chairman and CEO.
“Slipstream provides sophisticated users with a simple, transparent, and trusted means of adding complex Bitcoin transactions to the blockchain, provided they adhere to Bitcoin’s protocol,” Thiel said.
“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, and we look forward to building on this announcement to further assist those who are building on Bitcoin.”
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Not all of Marathon’s experiments have gone as smoothly as Slipstream
Marathon is one of the biggest Bitcoin miners in the world—pulling down 1,853 BTC in December of last year—and capping off a year in which it mined 12,852 Bitcoins and over a half a million dollars.
However, not all of its experiments have gone smoothly. An unexpected bug led to Marathon mining an invalid block, sparking questions among community members regarding the network’s security. Marathon cited the event as an example of the Bitcoin network’s resilience.
Mining an invalid block is controversial because it undermines the security and integrity of the blockchain network. Blockchain networks like Bitcoin rely on a consensus mechanism where miners compete to solve complex mathematical puzzles to validate and add new blocks of transactions to the blockchain. Each block must adhere to the network’s rules and protocols, ensuring that all transactions within the block are valid and legitimate.
When a miner produces an invalid block, it means that the block does not meet the network’s consensus rules. This could happen due to various reasons such as software bugs, intentional manipulation, or errors in the validation process. Invalid blocks can disrupt the smooth operation of the network and potentially lead to issues such as double-spending or transaction reversals.
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