Wind turbines operate in a field at sunrise (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Marathon Digital is going big on bitcoin, taking a page from MicroStrategy

The race to accumulate bitcoin is heating up, and Mara seems to have the wind in its sails.

12/3/24 1:36PM

Bitcoin-mining company MARA Holdings has been going big in every way it can lately, aggressively adding to its bitcoin stockpile as prices are skyrocketing. Today, the company announced it bought a wind farm in Texas “to convert underutilized sustainable resources into economic value, achieve near-zero energy cost, and enable broader renewable energy deployment.”

Additionally, the press release said, “The site will utilize last-generation ASIC mining hardware that would have otherwise been written off or sold into the secondary market,” reducing bitcoin-production costs and enabling the hardware “to continue operating profitably beyond their normal lifecycle, utilizing wind power.” The wind-farm purchase follows the company’s upsizing of its senior-note offering to $850 million (with a $150 million option) on December 2 from the original oversubscribed $700 million. The proceeds will be “primarily used to acquire bitcoin.”

Marathon Digital has also added 6,484 bitcoins “for approximately $618.3 million in cash at an average price of approximately $95,352 per bitcoin” just between October 1 and November 30, 2024, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. This brings Marathon’s total bitcoin stash to 34,959 as of November 30, gaining 8,563 bitcoin through purchases and 12,965 bitcoin through mining this year.

Marathon’s hoard is still far behind that of uber bitcoin stockpiler MicroStrategy, which holds 279,420 bitcoins as of November 10, 2024.

Great work by MARA team and looking forward to chasing @saylor and watching $MSTR accumulate more BTC and seeing price move higher. Great for all #bitcoin investors. https://t.co/EOJ8IVEZDy
— Fred Thiel (@fgthiel) November 19, 2024

Marathon seems to be taking a page from MicroStrategy in buying bitcoin via convertible notes, “similar to what Michael Saylor has so successfully done,” Phillip Shoemaker, executive director of Identity.com, a nonprofit organization providing decentralized identity verification, told Sherwood News.

In turn, this might trigger other miners to follow suit.

“I should note that other bitcoin miners are looking at Mara as a sign of what to do next, and I think this will spur more demand for renewable energy — not just from other bitcoin miners but also from those who run AI data centers,” Shoemaker said.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy is a financial journalist who’s written for Dow Jones, The Financial Times Group, and Business Insider, among others.

Sage D. Young5/1/26

The decentralized finance ecosystem had a brutal April, logging the highest monthly number of exploits ever at 28 hacks, with exploiters siphoning off a total of $635.2 million, data from DefiLlama shows.

The two largest exploits in April occurred on ethereum-based protocol KelpDAO and solana-native trading venue Drift. The incidents rattled on-chain users, as the total value locked in DeFi across all networks dropped from a monthly high of $99.5 billion to $84.3 billion on Friday.

“It’s a real problem, and if AI proponents (thinking specifically of Anthropic’s claims about Mythos) are to be believed, it’s only going to get worse,” according to Fredrick Collins, CEO of crypto analytics platform Velo.xyz. Collins argued that these exploits act as a significant limiter of institutional appeal, pointing to TheBlock’s report last week that JPMorgan held a similar view.

“It’s simple — for many people, having any chance that you lose your entire investment or balance in something supposed to be ‘safe’ is too much to bear,” Collins told Sherwood News.

However, not everyone thinks the recent hacks will curb interest from institutions. Nicolai Søndergaard, a research analyst at blockchain data firm Nansen, said to Sherwood, “I do not think these hacks will be a limit to institutional capital given the impact of AI and the speed at which threats appear stretch far beyond this industry.”

Søndergaard continued, “Crypto to me seems to have been hit harder as many projects perhaps wanted to get a product out there quickly and didn’t invest enough in security, even with companies around to audit.”

DeFi aims to enable internet users to have access to financial services, such as borrowing, lending, and trading, without any centralized intermediaries.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

5/1/26

After bitcoin’s best month in a year, analysts weigh in on factors for it to break $80,000 in May

May has an over 7% average historical return, but whether bitcoin can replicate this result and finally break the $80,000 level hinges on several factors.

Sage D. Young4/30/26

Riot Platforms rises following Q1 revenue beat

The bitcoin miner turned data center operator released first-quarter earnings that surpassed expectations for revenue. Shares built on strong gains from Thursday’s session in after-hours trading following the results.

Riot Platforms reported:

Q1 revenue of $167.2 million, growing 3.6% from the same quarter a year ago and surpassing analysts’ expectations of $131 million.
A diluted loss per share of $1.44, much worse than analysts’ consensus estimate of a $0.72 loss, which includes unrealized loss on its bitcoin holdings.

The bulk of company’s revenue stems from its bitcoin mining activity, which made up $111.9 million in the quarter, while its data center housing revenue stood at $33.2 million, per its press release.

The first quarter of 2026 marks an inflection point for Riot. CFO Jason Chung said on Thursday in the firm’s Q1 earnings conference call, “With the delivery of our first 5 megawatts to AMD this quarter, Riot is now an active data center operator, and for the first time, our top line now includes contracted lease revenue from an investment-grade tenant.”

The earnings report comes the same week the company announced amending its $200 million credit agreement with Coinbase by replacing a floating interest rate with a fixed rate, according to an SEC filing dated on Monday.

Sage D. Young

4/30/26

Trump-backed World Liberty token sinks to new all-time low amid governance proposal to unlock 62 billion tokens

The top 22 addresses voting in favor control 4.8 billion tokens, making up the majority of “yes” votes.