Wind turbines operate in a field at sunrise (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Marathon Digital is going big on bitcoin, taking a page from MicroStrategy

The race to accumulate bitcoin is heating up, and Mara seems to have the wind in its sails.

12/3/24 1:36PM

Bitcoin-mining company MARA Holdings has been going big in every way it can lately, aggressively adding to its bitcoin stockpile as prices are skyrocketing. Today, the company announced it bought a wind farm in Texas “to convert underutilized sustainable resources into economic value, achieve near-zero energy cost, and enable broader renewable energy deployment.”

Additionally, the press release said, “The site will utilize last-generation ASIC mining hardware that would have otherwise been written off or sold into the secondary market,” reducing bitcoin-production costs and enabling the hardware “to continue operating profitably beyond their normal lifecycle, utilizing wind power.” The wind-farm purchase follows the company’s upsizing of its senior-note offering to $850 million (with a $150 million option) on December 2 from the original oversubscribed $700 million. The proceeds will be “primarily used to acquire bitcoin.”

Marathon Digital has also added 6,484 bitcoins “for approximately $618.3 million in cash at an average price of approximately $95,352 per bitcoin” just between October 1 and November 30, 2024, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. This brings Marathon’s total bitcoin stash to 34,959 as of November 30, gaining 8,563 bitcoin through purchases and 12,965 bitcoin through mining this year.

Marathon’s hoard is still far behind that of uber bitcoin stockpiler MicroStrategy, which holds 279,420 bitcoins as of November 10, 2024.

Great work by MARA team and looking forward to chasing @saylor and watching $MSTR accumulate more BTC and seeing price move higher. Great for all #bitcoin investors. https://t.co/EOJ8IVEZDy
— Fred Thiel (@fgthiel) November 19, 2024

Marathon seems to be taking a page from MicroStrategy in buying bitcoin via convertible notes, “similar to what Michael Saylor has so successfully done,” Phillip Shoemaker, executive director of Identity.com, a nonprofit organization providing decentralized identity verification, told Sherwood News.

In turn, this might trigger other miners to follow suit.

“I should note that other bitcoin miners are looking at Mara as a sign of what to do next, and I think this will spur more demand for renewable energy — not just from other bitcoin miners but also from those who run AI data centers,” Shoemaker said.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy is a financial journalist who’s written for Dow Jones, The Financial Times Group, and Business Insider, among others.

Sage D. Young22h

Altcoin trading activity has lost its mojo

Non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies have seen their trading volume plummet in the past five months. The combined trading volume of ethereum, XRP, solana, dogecoin, SUI, and chainlink has decreased by 60% since crypto’s October 10 liquidation event, according to Thomas Probst, a research analyst at crypto markets data provider Kaiko.

Main Altcoins Trading Volume in USD — The trading volume of ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE, SUI, and LINK.

For all altcoins, spot trading volume on Binance has declined between 80% and 85% to $7.7 billion, while altcoin volume on other exchanges has dropped to $18.8 billion, down from a range of $63 billion to $91 billion in October, a Friday report from Decrypt found, citing data from CryptoQuant.

“This trend may be explained by a contraction in market liquidity over the same period,” Probst told Sherwood News. “This phenomenon is also reflected in the average 1% market depth, which stood at approximately $2.6 million before the October 10 crash and is now closer to $1.7 million when aggregated across ETH, XRP, SOL, SUI, and LINK.”

Market depth is used by investors and traders to gauge the scale of liquidity in a market. 1% market depth refers to the amount of liquidity needed to move the market by 1%.

CoinGlass’s Altcoin Season Index, a measure to assess the performance of non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies, has been sitting above 50 this week, suggesting that the current market is neither in a bitcoin dominant phase nor an altcoin season.

“Triple witching” day may put further pressure on bitcoin’s price

This is not “a favorable environment for risk assets.”

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy23h

Sage D. Young

3/19/26

Hyperliquid is the “1,000 pound gorilla in the room” leading year-to-date market gains amid conflict in the Middle East

While the crypto industry has shed $564.3 billion in 2026, Hyperliquid’s native token has bucked the downtrend and jumped 54.8% year to date.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

3/19/26

Bitcoin tumbles as oil and gas prices spike and the market’s mood turns risk-off

Bitcoin ETFs reverted to outflows and bitcoin suffered $192 million in liquidations in the past 24 hours.

Sage D. Young3/18/26

Payward, parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, puts plans for IPO on hold

Payward, crypto exchange Kraken’s parent company, has paused its plans for an initial public offering until market conditions improve, according to a report from CoinDesk that cited two people with knowledge of the matter.

Since the firm announced in November its preparation for an IPO of its common stock, the total market capitalization of the crypto industry has shed around $652.2 billion, from $3.2 trillion to $2.5 trillion as of Wednesday, data from CoinGecko shows.

The news comes two weeks after Kraken received approval for a master account from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, allowing the crypto exchange to connect to the Fed’s payment infrastructure used by traditional banks and credit unions.

Last year, Kraken raised $800 million at a $20 billion valuation from institutional investors such as Jane Street and Citadel Securities.

Payward, parent of crypto exchange Kraken, has put its IPO plans on hold