Marathon Digital, a titan in the Bitcoin mining sector, has announced the successful mining of Kaspa (KAS) tokens valued at $16 million. This strategic move, initiated in September, aims to broaden the company’s cryptocurrency portfolio beyond Bitcoin. Kaspa, known for its innovative solution to Bitcoin’s scalability challenge, has become a lucrative addition to Marathon’s mining endeavors.
On June 26, Marathon Digital declared that this diversification strategy has enabled the firm to leverage the significantly higher profit margins offered by Kaspa mining equipment, which can reach up to 95% efficiency in certain scenarios. “The integration of Kaspa mining into our operations has generated a new, Bitcoin-independent revenue stream,” stated Adam Swick, Marathon’s Chief Growth Officer.
Since the deployment of their inaugural Kaspa mining rigs in September 2023, Marathon has accumulated an impressive 93 million KAS tokens. The value of these tokens has skyrocketed by 420%, a stark contrast to Bitcoin’s 135% increase over the same period. The company has invested in an array of Kaspa-dedicated mining hardware, including the KS3, KS5, and KS5 Pro ASICs, totaling approximately 60 petahashes in computational power. Currently, half of this capacity is operational, with plans to fully install the remaining equipment by the third quarter.
Despite the focus on Kaspa, Marathon’s Vice President of Investor Relations, Robert Samuels, emphasized that Bitcoin remains the company’s primary interest. “Even when our Kaspa mining operations are fully operational, they will only utilize 1% of our total energy capacity,” Samuels remarked in a June 26 statement.
To date, Marathon has mined 9,761 Bitcoins (BTC), translating to a staggering $594.9 million in value. This figure dwarfs the revenue generated from Kaspa mining, highlighting the latter’s modest contribution to Marathon’s overall mining income. Nevertheless, the announcement of Marathon’s Kaspa mining success prompted a 2.4% surge in KAS token value, pushing the price to $0.172 and elevating the company’s total holdings to $16 million.
In related news, Bitcoin mining company Hut 8 secured a $150 million investment during a period marked by an AI industry surge. According to CoinGecko, Kaspa ranks as the fifth-largest proof-of-work cryptocurrency, boasting a market capitalization of $4.1 billion. With 24 billion KAS tokens currently in circulation, the supply is set to reach a ceiling of 28.7 billion.
Kaspa operates on a layer-1 protocol akin to Bitcoin, facilitating transactions with its native KAS token. However, it distinguishes itself with a Direct Acyclic Graph-derived structure, known as “BlockDAG,” which allows for simultaneous block additions rather than a sequential process. This architecture enables Kaspa to achieve a rapid block generation rate of approximately one block per second, significantly outpacing Bitcoin’s 10-minute block interval.
While Kaspa’s technological advancements are noteworthy, it remains a distant challenger to Bitcoin’s dominance. Bitcoin consistently records between 700,000 and 1 million unique active addresses engaging with its network daily, whereas Kaspa’s activity is around 20,000 unique addresses.
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