MARA Holdings' blocks won, but bitcoin production volume – two key indicators of mining efficiency – fell 6% month-on-month in February, the bitcoin miner said in a press release on Tuesday.
MARA said the decline was due to increased network complexity and three fewer working days in February compared to the previous month.
MARA shares closed at $13.94, up 1.3% after spending most of the day in negative territory. MARA has lost nearly 21% over the past month, amid a 10% decline in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency markets overall, according to Yahoo Finance data.
Last week, the Florida-based company reported in its fourth-quarter earnings report that it mined about 27%, or 998, fewer blocks in its latest fiscal quarter than it did in the same period last year, despite beating analysts' revenue and earnings per share estimates. Those results came at a time when bitcoin was still on the rise.
More competition, less rewards
However, the looming trade war and other macroeconomic uncertainties that have rocked cryptocurrency markets have also affected the mining industry.
Last April, a planned update to the Bitcoin network code halved the number of tokens allocated to miners for each block, making the mining process less profitable. At the same time, rising electricity prices became an additional problem, with MARA's electricity and hosting costs also increasing significantly by 70%, amounting to $127.4 million in Q4 2024, compared to $75.1 million in Q4 2023.
In a statement, MARA said it was completing construction of a 40-megawatt data center in Ohio that will house more than 10,000 S21 Pro submersible miners and that it plans to expand its “presence in the energy generation space.”
Cryptocurrency miner Bit Digital's Bitcoin output fell to around 165 tokens in the final quarter of 2024, down 59% from the previous quarter. Meanwhile, Bitdeer Technologies Group posted revenue of $69 million in the fourth quarter, down from $115 million a year earlier.
Bit Digital and Bitdeer rose 4.3% and 0.5%, respectively, on Tuesday. The companies' shares have fallen 26% and 32% over the past month.
Bitcoin recently traded above $87,300, up more than 1% in the past 24 hours, according to cryptocurrency market data provider CoinGecko.
Edited by James Rubin
Source: cryptonews.net
