Marathon Digital (MARA), one of the largest publicly listed bitcoin miners, sold 1,500 bitcoin for the first time in January to capitalize on the recent crypto market boom.
In a press release issued on Thursday, the miner stated that the decision was made to pay part of its expenses. “With bitcoin production rising and becoming more constant, we took the strategic choice, as previously intended, to sell some of our bitcoin to offset some of our operational expenditures and for general company objectives,” Marathon’s Chairman and CEO Fred Thiel said in a statement. The corporation still has around 11,418 bitcoin in reserve.
The decision aligns the miner’s approach with that of other of its competitors, such as Riot Platforms (RIOT), which began selling part of its mined bitcoin last year. Marathon was one of the few surviving miners who kept its mined bitcoin even after signaling that it could sell it at some time. The decision was most likely made when the price of bitcoin increased by nearly 40% in January. According to the statement, the miner wants to continue selling part of its mined bitcoin this year in order to cover its monthly operational costs.
According to the announcement, the miner had an operating hashrate or computational power of 11 exahash per second (EH/s) in January and expects to achieve 23 EH/s by the middle of 2023. The hashrate of the Bitcoin network is now about 282.55 EH/s, meaning that Marathon controls around 4% of the worldwide processing power.
Marathon said that it mined a record 687 bitcoin, a 45% increase from December of last year. “The increase in our bitcoin production was primarily due to our team’s ability to collaborate with the new hosting provider in McCamey, Texas, to address the maintenance and technical issues at the King Mountain data centre that had suppressed our bitcoin production in the fourth quarter of 2022,” Thiel explained.
The miner’s stock surged alongside the wider market on Thursday. However, the shares tumbled roughly 4% in after-market trade as bitcoin lost some of its earlier upward momentum.
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