Public bitcoin miner Marathon Digital Holdings scooped over 462.1 new bitcoin in January, down from 484.5 BTC mined in the previous month as it faced a double-digit increase in Bitcoin’s hashrate and operational fluctuations in its Hardin, Montana, facility, the company said in a Friday statement. The miner now holds approximately 8,595 BTC with a fair market value of approximately $330.6 million.
Year-over-year, however, Marathon’s production increased by about 816%, a result of the miner’s relentless search for increased hashrate capacity and power hosting agreements. The company said it had received over 93,000 bitcoin mining rigs from Bitmain, 32,710 of which are up and running in its mining farms as it works to containerize thousands of machines to deploy at Compute North’s facilities.
Marathon signed an agreement with the infrastructure company in May to host and manage 73,000 of the miner’s machines, but a December expansion of the deal foresaw an extra 30,000 rigs to be accommodated.
“We have begun installing miners in containers at Compute North’s new facilities, where construction is progressing well,” Marathon’s CEO, Fred Thiel, said in a statement. “These containers are currently awaiting energization. Based on current schedules, we believe that miner deployments will accelerate during the first quarter and that that trend will continue into the second quarter and throughout the rest of the year.”
While construction of Compute North’s facilities remain underway, Marathon said it expects to fully deploy all its miners by early next year, bumping the company’s mining fleet to consist of nearly 200,000 machines outputting 23.3 exahashes per second (EH/s).
The huge growth in the miner’s hashrate capacity from the current 3.6 EH/s would be made possible by the arrival of the tens of thousands machines Marathon recently ordered. The company bought 78,000 mining machines from Bitmain at the end of last year, a record purchase that cost over $879 million.
