MARA Pool Mines 11% More Bitcoin Blocks in Hashrate Recovery
Marathon, the largest public mining firm by market capitalization, has been recovering its hashrate as its MARA Pool’s average daily block production increased by 11.4% in April.
Data shows that Marathon’s proprietary MARA Pool mined 123 bitcoin blocks in the 29 days of April, which implies a daily production of 4.24 blocks. While that was still behind the 4.63 daily blocks achieved in January, it represents an 11.4% improvement over the production average in March.
As previously reported, Marathon’s hosting partner Applied Digital has been facing infrastructure issues at its Ellendale miner hosting site in North Dakota since mid-January.
The site was briefly re-energized in February only to be curtailed again to replace transformers, causing extended downtime for Marathon’s miners hosted in Ellendale.
Applied Digital said earlier this month that the re-energization process had begun with new transformers in place. The operating capacity of the Ellendale site increased from 25 MW on April 11 to 80 MW as of April 29, according to an update on Monday.
Yet still, that represented just 44% of the total available capacity of 180 MW. Applied Digital reiterated the expectation on Monday to reach an uptime of 65% to 75% for the Ellendale site by the end of May.
According to Marathon’s March production update, it had 27.8 EH/s of total energized hashrate across various sites and 6.5 EH/s of that was hosted in Applied Digital’s Ellendale data center. However, the average operating hashrate at the site was down to 0.9 EH/s in March.
With the hashrate recovery in April and the transaction fee spike, MARA Pool mined 858 bitcoins in April month-to-date, which was already higher than its March production despite the halving event slashing bitcoin’s block subsidies to 3.125 BTC since April 20.
However, bitcoin’s transaction fees have subsided since last week, causing bitcoin’s mining revenue to drop to 0.788 BTC/PH/s and hashprice to hit all-time lows under $50/PH/s.
