Bitcoin Miners Marathon Digital, Hut 8 Plot Hashrate Growth

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  • Marathon Dig­i­tal plans to add 167,000 bit­coin min­ers to its fleet between now and ear­ly 2023, which would boost its hashrate by near­ly sev­en times its cur­rent level
  • Hut 8 Mining’s upcom­ing Ontario facil­i­ty expects to bring company’s total hashrate to 3.35 exa­hash­es per sec­ond by the end of March

Cryp­to min­ers such as Marathon Dig­i­tal and Hut 8 Min­ing look to con­tin­ue increas­ing their hashrates after the over­all met­ric recent­ly hit an all-time high. 

Las Vegas-based Marathon Digital’s exist­ing min­ing fleet con­sists of 32,350 active min­ers pro­duc­ing rough­ly 3.5 exa­hash per sec­ond (EH/s). 

But after pur­chas­ing a record num­ber of Antmin­er S19 XP bit­coin min­ers from Bit­main in Decem­ber, the com­pa­ny projects that it will have 199,000 bit­coin min­ers pro­duc­ing about 23.3 EH/s by ear­ly 2023, accord­ing to an announce­ment made on Monday

Marathon Digital hashrate growth chart
Marathon Dig­i­tal hashrate growth chart. Source: Marathon Digital

“Today, we have access to top-tier host­ing and renew­able pow­er, a strong bal­ance sheet with $644.3 mil­lion in total liq­uid­i­ty, and near­ly 167,000 indus­try lead­ing bit­coin min­ers being added to our fleet between the start of this year and ear­ly 2023,” Marathon Dig­i­tal CEO Fred Thiel said in a statement. 

The com­pa­ny is installing machines at Com­pute North’s exist­ing facil­i­ties and test­ing deploy­ments at new loca­tions, he added.

Marathon expand­ed its agree­ment with Com­pute North last month to host more than 100,000 of Marathon’s pre­vi­ous­ly pur­chased bit­coin min­ers at mul­ti­ple loca­tions, includ­ing wind and solar farms across the US.

Hut 8 Min­ing, based in Cana­da, has an installed oper­at­ing capac­i­ty of 2.0 EH/s, a 125% increase in hashrate from a year ago, the com­pa­ny announced on Wednesday. 

The com­pa­ny pur­chased 2,505 MicroBT M30S machines from Foundry Dig­i­tal that were already installed at the company’s site in Med­i­cine Hat, Alber­ta, adding 228 peta­hash­es per sec­ond (PH/s) dur­ing the month of December.

Elec­tri­cal upgrades con­tin­ue at the Med­i­cine Hat site, which will allow for opti­mal hashrate effi­cien­cy from new MicroBT min­ers. These upgrades are on track to con­tribute an addi­tion­al 450 PH/s in Feb­ru­ary 2022.

Hut 8 con­tin­ues con­struc­tion on its site in North Bay, Ontario, which it expects to have oper­a­tional by the end of the first quar­ter. This will add rough­ly 850 PH/s of hashrate to its oper­a­tions, bring­ing the company’s total hashrate to 3.35 EH/s by the end of March.

The com­pa­ny entered into a $30 mil­lion senior secured equip­ment financ­ing term loan with Trin­i­ty Cap­i­tal for new MicroBT machines being installed at the Alber­ta and Ontario sites. 

Hashrate’s recent all-time high

Bit­coin hashrate, a mea­sure of the amount of com­put­ing pow­er that is secur­ing the net­work, hit an all-time high of about 208 mil­lion ter­a­hash­es per sec­ond (TH/s) on Jan. 1, accord­ing to Glassnode data. 

The pre­vi­ous high of 198.5 mil­lion TH/s, the data shows, was record­ed on April 15. 

Bit­coin hashrate was at about 179 EH/s, as of Tues­day, accord­ing to BTC.com. 

Com­pute North CEO Dave Per­rill not­ed the bit­coin hashrate’s rebound in an email last month fol­low­ing its decline after Chi­nese min­ers were forced offline due to nation­wide cryp­to bans.

“Expect [bitcoin’s hashrate] to dou­ble next year, as major indus­try play­ers promise that hun­dreds of megawatts of capac­i­ty will come online in 2022,” he wrote. “Even if this doesn’t entire­ly come to fruition, we will still see more than 3 [gigawatts] of pow­er com­ing online in all cor­ners of the US.”

Min­ers will like­ly con­tin­ue to have a dif­fi­cult time pur­chas­ing new gear in 2022 due to chip short­ages and sup­ply chain issuers, Per­rill added, which could ben­e­fit the estab­lished play­ers in the space. 

“It isn’t just about hav­ing the funds but also being well con­nect­ed to make the short-list to order gear before man­u­fac­tur­ers sell out. Rather than new enti­ties attempt­ing to enter the min­ing space and bring new machines online, 2022 will see an increased invest­ment in pub­licly trad­ed blockchain com­pa­nies that already have equip­ment online.

Holding bitcoin 

Marathon Dig­i­tal pro­duced near­ly 3,200 bit­coins in 2021, the com­pa­ny announced, which was an 846% year-over-year increase. More than a third of that came dur­ing the final three months of the year, includ­ing a record 484.5 self-mined bit­coins in December. 

The com­pa­ny last sold bit­coin in Octo­ber 2020, and since then, has been accu­mu­lat­ing all the bit­coin it gen­er­ates. It cur­rent­ly holds 8,133 BTC, which had a val­ue of about $365 mil­lion, as of 3 pm ET on Wednesday. 

Hut 8 Min­ing mean­while held 5,518 bit­coins on Dec. 31, which is 97% high­er than a year ago. It mined 276 of those in Decem­ber, up from 265 in November.

The val­ue of its total reserves was near­ly $250 mil­lion on Wednes­day afternoon.


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  • Ben Strack

    Ben Strack is a Den­ver-based reporter cov­er­ing macro eco­nom­ics, finan­cial ser­vices and dig­i­tal asset man­age­ment. Pri­or to join­ing Block­works, he cov­ered the asset man­age­ment indus­try for Fund Intel­li­gence, and was a reporter and edi­tor for var­i­ous local news­pa­pers on Long Island. He grad­u­at­ed from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land with a degree in journalism.

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