Marathon Digital increases mining capacity before halving with Texas acquisition

Marathon Digital increases mining capacity

Marathon Digital, one of the world’s biggest publicly traded Bitcoin miners, said it will acquire Applied Digital’s 200 megawatt Bitcoin mining data centre in Garden City, Texas, for about $87 million in cash.

It marks Marathon’s second major acquisition of data centres dedicated to Bitcoin mining in the last four months, after investing almost $180 million in two properties in January.

The newest addition and its subsequent expansion will increase the company’s mining portfolio to 1.1 gigawatts, 54% on sites directly owned and operated, it said.

The Garden City centre is located adjacent to a wind farm and uses mostly renewable energy.

Miners are increasing their computing power to compete after the halving in April, which will cut the number of coins awarded to successful miners by half, to 3.125. Companies like Marathon are racing to scale up and achieve wider margins to mitigate the plunge in revenue, DL News has reported.

Fred Thiel, Marathon’s chairman and CEO, said: “This transaction increases our influence over our current operations, reduces our cost per coin by approximately 20% at the site, and provides us with an additional 100 megawatts of capacity in which to expand.”

After the halving, “there will be some miners to lose profitability, maybe challenged, or maybe looking for an exit as their revenues will drop because the Bitcoin rewarded will drop,” Thiel told Bloomberg Television. “The simple math is, if the industry average break-even point was around $23,000 per Bitcoin, it will now go up to around $43,000.”

Salvador continues buying Bitcoin, transfers some to vault

El Salvador’s recently re-elected President Nayib Bukele said in posts on X that the country will continue to buy one Bitcoin a day with fiat currencies until such time as it becomes unaffordable.

The program began in November 2022.

He also revealed that the country would transfer a large amount of its Bitcoin holdings to a cold wallet and store it in a physical vault.

SBF brainstormed ideas to recreate his image

After the bankruptcy of FTX, convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried considered numerous approaches to remaking his image, including coming out as a Republican, or against the “woke agenda,” or even asking people in a Twitter poll what he ought to do, according to a Google document attached by prosecutors to a court filing.

Bankman-Fried, who bannered the 19-item list: “Note: these are all random probably bad ideas that aren’t vetted; CONFIDENTIAL,” will be sentenced on March 28. The document was first reported on by Bloomberg.

A public champion of a philosophy called effective altruism, which purports to find the best ways to help others, Bankman-Fried also listed among his various ideas: “Radical honesty on Twitter — just explain exactly what happened, in detail.”

Crypto market movers

• Bitcoin is up 1.73% today at $66,377.20.
• Ethereum is up 0.89% today at $3,550.85.

What we are reading

What investors need to know about crypto taxes amid the latest bitcoin rally — CNBC

Hong Kong police probe crypto exchange that vanished with $57m in deposits — DL News

Want to Be ‘Certified Crypto Expert?’ You Need 11 Hours and $229 — Bloomberg