Bitcoin (BTC) mining heavyweight Marathon Digital has revealed that it has mined Kaspa (KAS) — a token designed to unravel Bitcoin’s scalability downside — for $16 million since September to diversify away from Bitcoin.
In a June 26 announcement, Marathon Digital mentioned the transfer allowed the agency to “capitalize on the upper profitability” that may be obtained from Kaspa’s mining machines, which in some instances are as excessive as 95%.
“By mining Kaspa, we’re in a position to create a diversified earnings stream with Bitcoin,” defined Marathon’s Chief Growth Officer Adam Swick.
“Marathon was uniquely positioned to mine Kaspa and profit from the upper margins that exist for individuals who can deploy Kaspa ASICs immediately.”
Marathon has mined 93 million KAS tokens since deploying its first batch of Kaspa miners in September 2023. Since then, KAS tokens are up 420%, whereas Bitcoin is up 135%.
Marathon bought roughly 60 ASIC KS3, KS5 and KS5 Professional petahashes to mine Kaspa tokens. Half of them are at present operational, and the remaining might be put in someday within the third quarter.
Kaspa mining just isn’t a core
Nonetheless, Marathon’s VP of Investor Relations Robert Samuels emphasised that the miner just isn’t altering its major give attention to Bitcoin.
“Kaspa will solely account for 1% of our vitality capability as soon as absolutely deployed,” Samuels mentioned in a June 26 announcement.
“Let’s not attempt to spin it some other manner. To say that we’re ‘turning round’ is flawed and irresponsible.”
Since September, Marathon has mined 9,761 bitcoins value $594.9 million, which means that Kaspa’s mining operations characterize solely a small fraction of the agency’s complete mining income.
Regardless of this, KAS tokens rose 2.4% after Marathon broke the information, bringing its worth and Marathon’s complete stack to $0.172 and $16 million, respectively.
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Knowledge from CoinGecko reveals that Kaspa is the fifth largest proof-of-work cryptocurrency with a market cap of $4.1 billion. Whereas 24 billion KAS tokens are in circulation, the provision might be restricted to twenty-eight.7 billion.
Like Bitcoin, the Kaspa community is a Layer 1 protocol that facilitates transfers utilizing its personal KAS token.
Nonetheless, Kaspa implements a Direct Acyclic Graph structure — a “BlockDAG” — the place blocks are added to the community concurrently reasonably than linearly.
This ends in a excessive block velocity of round 1 block per second – which is orders of magnitude quicker than Bitcoin, which takes roughly 10 minutes to generate a block.
Nonetheless, Kaspa continues to be removed from a Bitcoin competitor. Bitcoin at present sees between 700,000 and 1 million distinctive energetic addresses interacting with the community every day, whereas Kaspa hovers across the 20,000 mark.
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