Despite a 45-day delay in delivering its mining rigs through the first quarter, Marathon Digital (MARA), one of the biggest publicly traded bitcoin miners, is still on schedule to fulfill its hashrate forecast of 23.3 exahash per second (EH/s) by early 2023, the company stated in a statement Monday.
Marathon Digital’s mining fleet has produced 1,258.6 bitcoin so far this year, a 556 percent increase over the same period last year. The following is a breakdown of the Company’s bitcoin production by month:
The Company last sold BTC on October 21, 2020, and has been “hodling” or hoarding all BTC created since then. As a result, Marathon now owns 9,373.6 BTC, including the 4,813 BTC it purchased in January 2021 at an average price of $31,168 per BTC. On April 1, 2022, the fair market value of one BTC was roughly $45,539, meaning that Marathon’s existing BTC holdings are worth around $427.7 million.
BTC production rises by 15% at Marathon Digital
Marathon’s CEO, Fred Thiel, stated that in the first quarter of 2022, the firm raised its bitcoin output by 15% over the previous quarter, producing a total of 1,259 bitcoins, despite the fact that the worldwide hash rate grew by around 17%. If the global hash rate had remained constant from the end of Q4 2021 to the end of Q4 2022, Marathon digital’s BTC production would have climbed 17 percent to 1,282 BTC. The company continues to hold, or HODL, all of its BTC, resulting in a total of 9,374 bitcoin, cementing our position as one of the greatest bitcoin holders among publicly traded companies.
The company blamed the delay on a longer-than-expected approval process for the power it needed to operate. Marathon CEO Fred Thiel, emphasizing that this process necessitated permits, which caused the deployment to be delayed said,
“Typically, power flows from power stations into the grid. However, to ensure we have a consistent power supply when the renewable sources are operating intermittently, we also needed power to flow from the grid back into the power station at scale.”
Marathon’s stock has plummeted 13% this year, while bitcoin has dropped 2.6 percent and mining peers Riot Blockchain (RIOT) and Core Scientific (CORZ) have plunged 9% and 16%, respectively. Marathon also acknowledged that, as Bloomberg previously reported, it is open to selling the company for the right price.