Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA) mined 1,245 Bitcoin in May, a 77% increase from the previous month, according to a press release on Friday. CEO Fred Thiel attributed the majority of the increase to Marathon’s proprietary software, which gives the miner the ability to control the output of the machines, the uptime of the machines, scaling up and down the hash rate of the machines, he said in an interview with journalists TV. Marathon also increased its operational computing power by 9% to 15.2 exahash/second (EH/S).
Ethan Vera, Chief Operating Officer at mining services firm Luxor Technologies, noted that Marathon operates its own mining pool, which means that there can be fluctuations in Bitcoin production to the expected value. In early May, miners saw an uptick in revenues thanks to higher transaction fees due to the popularity of Ordinals, a protocol that enabled added functionality on the Bitcoin blockchain.
Vera added that Ordinals significantly helped large scale miners like Marathon. The 77% increase in Marathon’s May Bitcoin production could likely be attributable to the fact that it wasn’t running its machines at full capacity during April, such that it potentially had a lot of room to increase its production in the following month. Marathon in the previous month produced markedly little Bitcoin per exahash, which can be partly attributed to downtime of its mining machines.
Marathon Digital Holdings’ stock on the Nasdaq was flat on Friday, outperforming some of its peers while Bitcoin rose about 1.3%.