Shares in Marathon Digital Holdings Inc. rose as much as 12% in midday trading Thursday after the Las Vegas-based cryptocurrency miner announced that it has reached a deal to buy bitcoin-mining machines from Bitmain.
Marathon didn’t say how many ANTMINER S19 XP bitcoin miners it is purchasing from Bitmain, but Chief Executive Fred Thiel said it is “the largest single order of S19 XPs, in terms of total hash rate” that Bitmain has ever received. Marathon said all of the machines are expected to be delivered between July 2022 and December 2022.
By early 2023, Marathon said it expects to have about 199,000 total miners operating at a hash rate of 23.3 EH/s, which Marathon said “represents more than a 600% increase from our current hash rate.” Hash rate is an industry term used to quantify the total computing power of all miners in a given network.
Thiel said the additional mining power will make it “potentially the largest known miner in the world.”
The stock has soared from a closing price of $10.44 a share on Dec. 31, 2020, to its opening price on Thursday of $34.05 as bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies boomed in popularity and value.
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