One of Bitcoin’s best-known developers is now working for one of Bitcoin’s biggest miners. Peter Todd, a longtime Bitcoin Core contributor, has joined the MARA Foundation as lead maintainer of Slipstream, MARA’s private transaction service for the Bitcoin network.
By Michael Nguyen | October 2, 2026
The move, announced by the foundation on Thursday, puts a famous name from Bitcoin’s early engineering culture inside a publicly listed mining company. For Bitcoin holders — the coin is trading around 86,400 USD after a strong 24 hours, up roughly 3 percent — the story is really about who gets to see your transactions before they are confirmed, and why a miner is investing in that question.
The Hook: A Side Door for Bitcoin Transactions
Normally, when you send bitcoin, your transaction is broadcast across Bitcoin’s public peer-to-peer network — think of it as a town square where every transaction is shouted out and relayed from computer to computer until a miner packs it into a block. Anyone watching that square can see transactions waiting in line, including bots built to exploit them.
Slipstream offers a side door. It lets users send transactions straight to MARA Pool, the company’s mining pool, skipping the public town square entirely. The transaction stays private until it is confirmed in a block. In his new role, Todd will be responsible for developing and running the service.
On-Chain Evidence: Why the Coldcard Hack Made This Urgent
The service is not a theoretical convenience. It proved genuinely useful after hackers exploited Coldcard hardware wallets in July, stealing more than 115 million USD in user funds. In the aftermath of that breach, victims and services needed to move coins without attackers watching the public network for exactly the transactions they were hunting.
Because transactions sent through Slipstream stay hidden until confirmation, key information — including the exposure of users’ public keys — is kept out of view while it matters most. For a thief scanning the mempool, the waiting room of pending transactions, a Slipstream payment simply is not there to see.
The Core Conflict: What Does a Miner Want With a Privacy Service?
This is where ordinary Bitcoin holders should lean in, because the incentives here are unusual. A private submission channel gives MARA Pool access to transactions it might not otherwise mine — a business advantage in an industry where margins are thin and every fee counts. It also gives the miner influence over which experimental Bitcoin uses get a proving ground.
Slipstream first drew attention in 2024 for publishing large Ordinals inscriptions — the controversial practice of embedding data such as images directly onto the Bitcoin blockchain. More recently it has been used for research projects like Quantum Safe Bitcoin, work on protecting coins from future quantum computers, and Binohash, a technique for emulating covenants — rules that restrict how coins can be spent — without changing Bitcoin’s core protocol.
Todd’s own philosophy explains why this pairing makes sense. He has long argued that mempool policy — the rules deciding which pending transactions get relayed — should follow what the market wants miners to mine, rather than restricting how people use Bitcoin. His hire signals MARA wants a credentialed steward, not just an operator.
Who Is Peter Todd, and Why Does His Name Carry Weight?
Todd is about as deep in Bitcoin’s engineering history as one can be. He is a longtime Bitcoin Core contributor, co-authored BIP 125, the proposal that created replace-by-fee — the mechanism letting users bump up a fee to unstick a slow transaction — and created OpenTimestamps, a system for anchoring documents to the Bitcoin blockchain. In 2024 he launched Libre Relay, a Bitcoin Core fork with looser relay rules for non-standard transactions.
“I most look forward to seeing what’s possible on Bitcoin — using Slipstream as a proving ground for experimental development and protocol innovation,” Todd said in the announcement. He added that the role is “a natural complement” to his work on Libre Relay and mempool policy more broadly, calling it “a good opportunity to build bridges between Bitcoin Core developers and miners.”
Market Implications: What This Means for Your Coins
For miners and stakers — and for investors watching the sector — the hire is part of a visible pattern: mining companies are no longer just selling electricity converted into hash. They are building services, research programs, and infrastructure businesses on top of their block-production position. A miner that attracts top protocol talent can monetize transaction flow that public relay rules discourage.
For everyday Bitcoin users, the practical benefit is narrower but real: a growing set of tools that make moving large sums less like walking through a glass hallway. Services that keep pending transactions out of public view reduce the window in which attackers, front-runners, and surveillance firms can prepare.
There is a fair critique to weigh, too. If private submission channels become the norm, the public network could end up carrying less information and fewer transactions, with influence concentrating in the biggest pools. Todd’s stated goal of building bridges between Core developers and miners is, in part, an answer to exactly that concern.
The Verdict
Hiring Peter Todd will not move bitcoin’s price this week. But it is a meaningful signal about where mining-industry competition is heading: toward specialized financial infrastructure and protocol-level talent. Investors tracking mining stocks should watch whether MARA converts this capability into measurable transaction-flow revenue; Bitcoin users should watch whether Slipstream’s proving-ground experiments — quantum safety, covenant emulation — graduate into features the whole network benefits from.
In a market obsessed with price, the quieter story is often the more important one. One of Bitcoin’s most principled engineers just decided the best place to do his work is inside a mining company. That tells you something about where Bitcoin’s next decade of innovation will come from.
The cryptocurrency market remains highly volatile. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
Peter Todd inside a publicly listed miner is a sentence I did not expect to read this year. Slipstream at least has a serious maintainer now.
peter todd inside a listed miner running a private mempool. 2026 is a strange timeline
Slipstream is opt in so the town square stays intact, but the PR around who sees txs first deserves the scrutiny it gets.
at least someone with actual core credibility is the maintainer and not some rando. could be worse mara
opt in is fine until big wallets default to sending through slipstream and the public mempool thins out. That transition is where the town square quietly erodes.
Slipstream still routes through the public mempool when a tx does not qualify, that is the part everyone skipping. The thinning scenario needs wallets to reroute by default and none have said they will
Remember when Todd spent years calling out miner centralization? Now he is on MARA’s payroll. People need jobs, I get it, but the irony is thick.
he literally said private relay networks were inevitable like a decade ago. better one run by someone who understands the risks than some random outfit
There is a difference between working for a miner and endorsing everything a miner does. The code is public, judge it on that.
the irony would be him running the relay himself. taking a maintainer job with the code public is just employment with receipts, judge the commits
the irony take is cheap tbh. todd reviewing slipstream code as an actual maintainer beats a nobody running it. judge the commits not the payroll
btc up 3 pct to 86k and the actual story is who gets to see fee traffic first. slipstream pricing matches standard relay so far, watch that not move
mara running a private relay with a cve bounty history like todds is genuinely the least bad version of this. still watching which txs get preferred tho