Marathon’s MARA Pool Shows Signs of Recovery with 11% Increase in Bitcoin Block Production
Marathon, the largest public mining firm by market capitalization, is witnessing a notable recovery in its MARA Pool’s Bitcoin mining operations. According to recent data, the MARA Pool’s average daily block production increased by 11.4% in April, with a total of 123 Bitcoin blocks mined over 29 days, averaging 4.24 blocks per day. Although this figure is still below the January peak of 4.63 daily blocks, it marks a significant improvement from March’s average, according to TheMinerMag.
The recovery comes amid ongoing challenges at Marathon’s hosting partner, Applied Digital’s Ellendale miner hosting site in North Dakota. The site has faced repeated downtimes since mid-January due to infrastructure issues, including the need to replace transformers which disrupted operations. The recent re-energization of the site in April, with new transformers installed, has boosted the operating capacity from 25 MW on April 11 to 80 MW by April 29. However, this still only represents 44% of the site’s total available capacity of 180 MW.
Applied Digital is optimistic, projecting an uptime of 65% to 75% at the Ellendale site by the end of May. This anticipated improvement could further bolster Marathon’s mining capabilities, which reported a total energized hashrate of 27.8 EH/s across various sites in March, with 6.5 EH/s hosted at the Ellendale data center.
Despite these infrastructure challenges, Marathon’s hashrate recovery in April, combined with a spike in transaction fees, resulted in the mining of 858 bitcoins for the month—surpassing its March production figures. This achievement is particularly notable given the recent halving event on April 20, which reduced Bitcoin block subsidies to 3.125 BTC.
However, the decline in Bitcoin’s transaction fees over the last week has led to a drop in mining revenue to 0.788 BTC/PH/s, with the hashprice reaching all-time lows under $50/PH/s. This underscores the volatile nature of Bitcoin mining economics and the impact of network dynamics on profitability.
