Bitcoin (BTC) mining heavyweight Marathon Digital revealed it has mined $16 million value of Kaspa (KAS) — a token designed to handle Bitcoin’s scalability downside — since September to diversify from Bitcoin.
In a June 26 announcement, Marathon Digital said the transfer allowed the agency to “capitalize on the upper margins” attainable with Kaspa mining machines, that are as much as 95% in some circumstances.
“By mining Kaspa, we’re capable of create a stream of income that’s diversified from Bitcoin,” defined Marathon’s chief development officer, Adam Swick.
“Marathon was uniquely positioned to mine Kaspa and to capitalize on the upper margins that exist for individuals who can deploy Kaspa ASICs as we speak.”
Marathon has mined 93 million KAS tokens because it deployed its first batch of Kaspa miners in September 2023. KAS tokens have surged 420% since then, whereas Bitcoin has increased 135%.
Marathon has bought roughly 60 petahashes of KS3, KS5, and KS5 Professional ASICs to mine Kaspa tokens. Half of that’s presently operational, whereas the rest might be put in someday within the third quarter.
Kaspa mining is not a pivot
Nonetheless, Maraton’s Vice President of Investor Relations, Robert Samuels, pressured that the miner is just not altering its major focus from Bitcoin.
“Kaspa will signify simply 1% of our power capability as soon as totally deployed,” said Samuels in a June 26 X publish.
“Let’s not attempt to spin it another manner. To say we’re ‘pivoting’ is incorrect and irresponsible.”
Marathon has mined 9,761 Bitcoin — value $594.9 million — since September, that means its Kaspa mining operations have solely made up a small fraction of the agency’s complete mining income.
Regardless of this, KAS tokens rallied 2.4% since Marathon broke the information, taking its worth and Marathon’s complete KAS stack to $0.172 and $16 million, respectively.
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CoinGecko knowledge reveals that Kaspa is the fifth largest proof-of-work cryptocurrency with a $4.1 billion market cap. Whereas 24 billion KAS tokens are in circulation, the provision might be capped at 28.7 billion.
Like Bitcoin, the community Kaspa is a layer-1 protocol that facilitates transfers utilizing its native token, KAS.
Nonetheless, Kaspa implements a Direct Acyclic Graph-derived architecture — “BlockDAG” — the place blocks are added to the community concurrently moderately than linearly.
It leads to a quick block fee — about 1 block per second — which is orders of magnitude quicker than Bitcoin, which takes roughly 10 minutes to construct a block.
Kaspa continues to be removed from being a Bitcoin competitor, nevertheless. Bitcoin presently sees wherever between 700,000 and 1 million distinctive energetic addresses work together with the community every day, whereas the Kaspa hovers across the 20,000 mark.
