Key Points
- Bitcoin mining company Marathon Digital aims to double its mining capacity and reach a hash rate of 50 EH/s by 2024.
- The firm has recently acquired additional mining sites, boosting its overall capacity, and does not need to raise further capital to meet its targets.
Marathon Digital, a leading player in the Bitcoin mining industry, recently unveiled its plans for the hash rate it aims to achieve in 2024. The announcement came in the wake of the Bitcoin halving event that took place last week, which saw miner rewards drop from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC.
The company has set an ambitious target, revising its 2024 hash rate goal from 35-37 exahashes per second (EH/s) to 50 EH/s. This decision is supported by Marathon Digital’s recent acquisitions, which have significantly expanded its overall capacity.
Marathon Digital’s Expansion Plan
Fred Thiel, the CEO of Marathon Digital, stated on Thursday that the company plans to double its mining scale in 2024, thanks to the added capacity. Thiel also mentioned that the company is fully funded and does not need to raise additional capital to meet these targets.
In March, Marathon Digital acquired a 200-megawatt Bitcoin mining facility from Digital Applied for $87.3 million. It also purchased two more mining sites from Generate Capital for $179 million, which have a combined capacity of approximately 400 megawatts.
Following the fourth Bitcoin halving event, Marathon Digital’s stock price surged by over 25%, a trend observed across other miners in the industry. The increase in demand was largely driven by memecoin enthusiasts and non-fungible token (NFT) creators, who used the Runes protocol to create and embed “rare satoshis”.
Impact of Bitcoin Halving on Hashprice
Within a week of the Bitcoin halving event, the Bitcoin “hashprice” experienced a significant drop. The “hashprice” is a metric that indicates the earnings potential for a miner utilizing one petahash per second of computing power per day. According to the Hashrate data Index, the Bitcoin “hashprice” fell to $57, reaching its lowest point at $55 after the collapse of FTX in November 2022.
The hashprice did experience a brief surge to $139 after the halving event as transaction fees increased due to heightened activity associated with the Rune protocol. This protocol enables the creation of nonfungible tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain. However, this surge was short-lived as fees returned to pre-halving levels and mining difficulty increased, as shown by CryptoQuant data.
