Downtime or Bad Luck? Marathon’s Pool Mines No Bitcoin Blocks

The number of blocks mined by Marathon’s proprietary MaraPool has dropped sharply over the weekend, casting doubts on whether the largest public bitcoin mining company is experiencing severe hashrate downtime or if it was purely due to bad luck.

According to bitcoin’s network data, MaraPool has been producing on average 5 blocks each day since the New Year until the 25th. However, the number gradually declined to 2 and 1 blocks on Friday and Saturday, respectively, before dropping to 0 on Sunday. It has mined no blocks on Monday so far either.

It is unclear whether the decline of mined blocks and rewards is caused purely by bad luck, hashrate downtime, or both. Marathon has not responded to TheEnergyMag’s request for comment as of publishing.

After significant downtime in 2022 due to exiting the Hardin, Montana site, Marathon began recovering its hashrate in January 2023 and has notably ramped up bitcoin production since May. Concurrently, MaraPool has been consistently producing multiple blocks every day since then untile the past weekend.

In December, the company achieved a realized hashrate of 25.64 EH/s with a record of 1,853 BTC in monthly production. That accounted for 103% of its installed hashrate of 24.7 EH/s, thanks to the odds in favor of its solo mining strategy.

Despite the drop of bitcoin block productions in recent days, MaraPool mined 940 BTC in January month-to-date, which accounted for 3.25% of the total bitcoin rewards so far. But that number dropped from 5.05% in December.