Marathon Digital has been quietly mining something other than Bitcoin recently. Is it the beginning of a new trend?

‍What’s happening:‍

• Marathon Digital (NASDAQ: MARA) has been mining cryptocurrency Kaspa, which has slowly begun to build into a meaningful digital asset holding
  

Why it matters:‍

• Kaspa has seen a massive surge in trading volume and user adoption of late, in large part due to the rapid rise in Kaspa mining operations and the successful listing of Kaspa onto many large crypto exchanges
  

By the numbers:‍

• Kaspa currently has a market capitalization of $4.4B USD
  
• Once Marathon Digital has fully deployed their planned mining operations for Kaspa, it will represent approximately 16% of Kaspa’s global hash rate
  
• Marathon Digital’s current Kaspa holdings are worth roughly $17M USD
  
• Only 1% of Marathon Digital’s 1,100 megawatt data centre operations are being used for Kaspa mining
  

Going deeper:‍

• Kaspa has become highly profitable to mine in large part due to their fast block rates which enables miners to earn more block rewards in a specific time frame
  
• Kaspa was originally launched without any pre-mining or pre-sales, which was done in order to maintain the integrity of having a fully decentralized network from the very beginning
  

The intrigue:‍

• Marathon Digital is currently the only publicly listed Bitcoin miner in the United States to disclose that they are mining Kaspa

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