The largest publicly traded mining company in the United States, MARA (formerly Marathon Digital), reported its financial results for September 2024. In the first month of autumn, MARA mined 705 bitcoins ($43 million at the current exchange rate), which averaged 23.5 BTC per day, according to the company's report.
The company also said it had increased its mining capacity by 5% compared to August, to 36.9 EH/s (exahashes per second), and its Bitcoin holdings to nearly 26,842 coins ($1.6 billion). The report noted that the company had not sold a single mined Bitcoin. MARA's holdings of the main cryptocurrency put it second only to Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy among the largest corporate BTC holders.
Miners earn money from two factors: a fixed reward for adding new transaction blocks to the blockchain and fees for processing user transactions. However, due to the high competition in the Bitcoin mining market, companies have increasingly turned to alternative sources of income. New areas include the development of decentralized financial applications based on Bitcoin, the development of artificial intelligence, and the purchase of physical Bitcoin per share of a public company.
BlackRock is the majority shareholder of MARA (formerly Marathon Digital), the largest mining company in the United States.
"Our largest shareholder today is BlackRock. They own 13-14% of our stock. Same with Fidelity. Basically, you have BlackRock, Fidelity, Vanguard, and then a long list of other investors," Fred Thiel, CEO of MARA, told Forbes.
Institutional investors have been indirectly investing in Bitcoin for years through the purchase of shares in crypto companies. According to Thiel, the share of such investors has only grown in 2024. In his opinion, this may be due not only to Bitcoin itself, but also to the development of artificial intelligence, which is used by miners as new sources of income thanks to AI-compatible infrastructure.
Michael Saylor's MicroStrategy has a similar shareholder composition: BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard Group, Citadel Securities and other financial corporations collectively own about a third of the company's shares.
MicroStrategy and MARA are the world's largest corporate Bitcoin holders, with the latest figures showing they hold 252,220 and 26,842 BTC, respectively.
