Marathon Digital secures 16 million investment in Kaspa to broaden beyond Bitcoin mining

Bitcoin mining giant Marathon Digital has announced that it has mined $16 million worth of Kaspa (KAS) tokens since September as a means of diversifying its revenue streams. The move has allowed Marathon to take advantage of the higher profitability associated with Kaspa mining machines, which can reach up to 95% in some cases. According to Marathon’s Chief Growth Officer, Adam Swick, mining Kaspa has enabled the company to generate income that is distinct from Bitcoin. Since deploying its first batch of Kaspa miners in September 2023, Marathon has mined a total of 93 million KAS tokens. The value of KAS tokens has surged by 420% since then, compared to Bitcoin’s 135% increase. To mine Kaspa tokens, Marathon has acquired approximately 60 petahashes of KS3, KS5, and KS5 Pro ASICs, with half of them currently operational and the rest expected to be installed in the third quarter. However, Marathon’s Vice President of Investor Relations, Robert Samuels, emphasized that the company’s main focus remains on Bitcoin, with Kaspa representing only 1% of its energy capacity once fully deployed. Despite this, the news of Marathon’s Kaspa mining operations has led to a 2.4% rally in KAS tokens, bringing the price to $0.172 and the company’s total KAS holdings to $16 million. Kaspa is currently the fifth-largest proof-of-work cryptocurrency with a market cap of $4.1 billion, and its token supply will be capped at 28.7 billion. Similar to Bitcoin, Kaspa operates as a layer-1 protocol and uses its native token, KAS, for transfers. However, Kaspa utilizes a Direct Acyclic Graph-derived architecture called “BlockDAG,” which allows blocks to be added to the network simultaneously rather than linearly. This results in a much faster block rate of approximately 1 block per second, compared to Bitcoin’s average of 10 minutes per block. Despite its advantages, Kaspa still has a long way to go before it can compete with Bitcoin, as the latter sees significantly higher daily interaction with its network, with up to 1 million unique active addresses compared to Kaspa’s 20,000.