Marathon Digital Dives Into Kaspa Mining to Expand Revenue Base

Marathon Digital, traditionally a Bitcoin powerhouse, has recently branched out to mine Kaspa (KAS), a token engineered to solve Bitcoin‘s scalability issues. Since September last year, Marathon has extracted an impressive $16 million worth of Kaspa, utilizing it to fortify and diversify its income streams away from Bitcoin alone.

The company initiated Kaspa mining with the deployment of cutting-edge mining rigs capable of producing profit margins up to 95%. This strategic move has harvested 93 million KAS tokens, which have seen a 420% increase in value since their initial mining, significantly outpacing Bitcoin’s growth rate over the same period. Despite this, Kaspa operations only represent a tiny sliver of Marathon’s total mining effort, aimed at 1% of their energy capacity.

The decision to mine Kaspa has not shifted Marathon’s focus from Bitcoin. Robert Samuels, Vice President of Investor Relations at Marathon, emphasized that the company’s primary commitment remains with Bitcoin, noting that the venture into Kaspa is not a pivot but a strategic expansion. He also stated that labeling this move as a pivot is both “wrong and irresponsible.”

Kaspa, which operates on a layer-1 protocol, adopts a unique BlockDAG-derived architecture called GHOSTDAG. This allows the network to process transactions much faster than Bitcoin, achieving a block rate of about one block per second—a stark contrast to Bitcoin’s 10-minute rate. Yet, with daily active addresses hovering around 20,000, Kaspa’s network activity pales in comparison to Bitcoin’s.

Despite its modest footprint in Marathon’s portfolio, the announcement of their Kaspa mining activities spurred a 2.4% rally in KAS token prices. With Marathon’s ongoing investment in Kaspa, encompassing the purchase of 60 petahashes of advanced ASICs—half of which are already operational—the firm is setting a robust foundation for continued growth in the rapidly evolving cryptocurrency landscape.