Key Points
- Marathon Digital, a Bitcoin mining company, aims to double its hash rate by 2024.
- The company’s goal is in response to Bitcoin’s fourth halving event and recent acquisitions.
Marathon Digital, a well-known Bitcoin mining firm, has made plans to increase its 2024 hash rate growth target. This decision comes in light of Bitcoin’s fourth halving event, which led to a reduction in block subsidy rewards for miners from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC.
Marathon Digital’s Ambitious Plans
At the start of 2024, Marathon Digital is expected to have a total hash rate of approximately 24.7 exahash per second (EH/s) across its mining facilities. The company initially aimed to boost its hash rate by about 46% during the year, targeting 35-37 EH/s.
However, thanks to increased machine orders and capacity due to recent acquisitions, the firm now anticipates its operations to scale up and achieve a fully funded hash rate of around 50 EH/s by the end of 2024.
Marathon’s CEO, Fred Thiel, believes that the company can double its mining operations in 2024 and reach 50 exahash by the end of the year, thanks to the available capacity from recent acquisitions and the hash rate accessible through current machine orders.
Bitcoin Mining Post-Halving
Charlie Schumacher, Marathon Digital’s VP of Corporate Communications, said that the mining industry essentially experienced a halving event last year. In 2023, Bitcoin’s difficulty rate doubled, yet the industry performed well.
Leading Bitcoin mining firms remain optimistic for this halving cycle despite generally failing to outperform Bitcoin year-to-date, according to analysts. The recent underperformance was attributed to strong U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund flows and concerns about the halving’s impact on miners’ revenue.
Despite concerns about the impact on miner revenue, some miners are still at all-time highs in terms of U.S. dollar revenue, providing solid balance sheets post-halving alongside relatively low debt.
While the consolidation of mining operations towards large public companies presents concerns about hash rate centralization, public miners considerably expanded their operations in the prior halving cycle. The industry is expected to further consolidate towards four leading public miners, including Marathon, CleanSpark, Riot Platforms, and Cipher Mining.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Hits New High
Bitcoin mining difficulty increased by 2% on Wednesday, reaching a new all-time high. This marks the first time the metric has increased in the initial adjustment following a halving event.
In previous halvings, transaction fee rewards were insufficient to prevent a reduction in Bitcoin’s hash rate following the events. However, this time around, the hash rate has remained near all-time highs as miners’ transaction fee rewards surged post-halving.
Much of the transaction fee activity can be attributed to the hype surrounding Runes, a new fungible token standard for Bitcoin launched at the halving. This is driven by speculative activity by retail traders to mint new tokens.
