Leading BTC miner Marathon starts mining KAS tokens to diversify revenues

What’s new? US bitcoin miner Marathon Digital (MARA), which leads the list of publicly traded industry companies with a capitalization of $5,47 billion, has started mining native tokens of the Layer 1 (L1) blockchain Kaspa (KAS). Since last September, the company has mined 93 million KAS worth $15 million.

Material by CoinDesk

What else is known? For KAS mining, Marathon uses rigs with a total hashrate of 30 PH/s on its farm in the state of Texas. A figure it plans to double by the third quarter of this year. Marathon’s chief growth officer Adam Swick said that mining an additional asset allows it to diversify its revenues.

Kaspa, like BTC, operates on the Proof of Work (Pow) consensus algorithm, but, unlike the first cryptocurrency, uses the GHOSTDAG protocol, which allows for the simultaneous issuance of multiple blocks. The company specified that this approach helps to increase the speed of transactions for users and increase the reward per block for miners.

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KAS ranks 27th in the overall cryptocurrency ranking and fifth among PoW tokens with a capitalization of $4,2 billion. It is trading at $0,1739, having added 8% overnight. Weekly growth was 18%, and since the beginning of the year, the asset is up by 55,3%. BTC is showing an increase of 44% this year.

Kaspa is an open-source decentralized scalable L1 blockchain. According to the official website, multiple blocks are generated every second and a full transaction confirmation takes 10 seconds, making KAS suitable for everyday transactions.

Due to another halving of the bitcoin network, which took place on April 20 and halved the reward for mining blocks (to 3,125 coins), miners have started to diversify their income. According to The Block, in the previous two months, bitcoin miners’ revenues had fallen to an all-time low.

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Some members of the industry have started renting out capacity to AI startups for computations. Among them is one of the industry leaders, Core Scientific, which signed a 12-year, $3,5 billion contract with startup CoreWave. According to analysts at JPMorgan Bank, the deal triggered a surge in the value of miners’ shares, causing them to outperform bitcoin in terms of returns since early June.

As for Marathon, it launched a pilot project to supply excess heat from farms to heat homes in the Satakunta region of Finland. The company sees the sale of recycled heat as a potential new source of revenue.