MARA Holdings’ bitcoin mining output fell 25% in June as the company faced adverse weather conditions at its Texas facility and ongoing difficulties that have hampered mining in the industry as a whole, according to its June report .
The Florida-based company mined 713 bitcoins in June, down 237 tokens from May. Likewise, the bitcoin miner mined just 211 blocks last month, down 25% from the record 282 blocks mined in May.
As of June 30, the company reportedly held 49,940 BTC, equivalent to more than $5 billion.
MARA attributed the decline in production to adverse weather conditions and increased demands on Bitcoin mining on its own blockchain.
“The drop was primarily due to reduced uptime due to weather conditions and the temporary shutdown of older machines in Garden City while storm damage was repaired,” MARA CEO Fred Thiel said Tuesday. “Natural variability in block luck — an expected pattern when running our own mining pool — also contributed.”
However, the company also said it plans to increase its network capacity by 40% to 75 exahashes by the end of the year. “This goal is consistent with both our rapid expansion and our commitment to using affordable energy in a capital-efficient manner,” Thiel said.
Exahashes are a unit of measurement of computing power and security of a mining network.
Bitcoin mining is the process by which miners solve complex cryptographic puzzles to add blocks of transactions to the Bitcoin blockchain, earning tokens as a reward for their efforts to secure the network. The difficulty of the process increased by about 2.6% to 126.4 terahashes between April 30 and June 17, according to cryptocurrency mining calculator CoinWarz.
MARA closed at 15.70, up 0.1%, according to Yahoo Finance data.
Bitcoin recently traded at $105,862, down 0.2% from Monday, according to cryptocurrency market data provider CoinGecko.
The June results came against a backdrop of overall production declines over the past few months, although MARA did see a 38% month-on-month increase in block production in May.
MARA’s decline in bitcoin production also comes as the company looks to double down on its efforts to increase its token holdings. To that end, MARA announced in March that it would be launching a $2 billion stock offering to increase the number of tokens on its balance sheet.
The miner is one of the few publicly traded companies that has an aggressive bitcoin acquisition strategy, similar to Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), which changed its focus from software development to bitcoin accumulation in 2020. According to bitcointreasuries.net , more than 140 companies hold bitcoin at press time.
Edited by James Rubin
Source: cryptonews.net
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