Marathon’s Mining Pool, MaraPool, To Cease Filtering Transactions

LAS VEGAS, May 31, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Marathon Digital Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:MARA) (“Marathon” or “Company”), one of the largest enterprise Bitcoin self-mining companies in North America, announced that the Company’s Bitcoin mining pool, MaraPool, has adopted and implemented Bitcoin Core version 0.21.1.

Bitcoin Core version 0.21.1 is the latest update to the Bitcoin client software, which is maintained and updated by a large open-source developer community that collaborates to launch new features and fixes. This latest update contains a variety of features, including the Taproot soft fork, which are designed to improve privacy, improve scalability, and lay the groundwork for future enhancements to Bitcoin’s functionality. According to the official release from Bitcoin Core:

“If activated, these improvements will allow users of single-signature scripts, multisignature scripts, and complex contracts to all use identical-appearing commitments that enhance their privacy and the fungibility of all bitcoins. Spenders will enjoy lower fees and the ability to resolve many multisig scripts and complex contracts with the same efficiency, low fees, and large anonymity set as single-sig users. Taproot and schnorr also include efficiency improvements for full nodes such as the ability to batch signature verification. Together, the improvements lay the groundwork for future potential upgrades that may improve efficiency, privacy, and fungibility further.”

Marathon will adopt the update without modification. As a result, Marathon’s mining pool, MaraPool, will no longer filter transactions. Once the update is complete, the pool will begin validating transactions in a manner consistent with all other miners who use the standard node.

“Marathon is committed to the core tenets of the Bitcoin community, including decentralization, inclusion, and no censorship,” said Fred Thiel, Marathon’s CEO. “Over the coming week, we will be updating all our miners to the full standard Bitcoin core 0.21.1 node, including support for Taproot. By adopting the full standard Bitcoin core node, we will be validating transactions on the blockchain in the exact same way as all other miners who use the standard node. We look forward to continue being a collaborative and supportive member of the Bitcoin community and to realizing the vision of Bitcoin as the first decentralized, peer-to-peer payment network that is powered by its users rather than a central authority or middlemen.”