Bitcoin miner Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA) mined 1,245 bitcoin in May, up 77% from previous month with the help of its proprietary software.
“The increased production was due to an increased hash rate and a significant increase in transaction fees, which accounted for approximately 11.8% of the total bitcoin we earned in the last month,” CEO Fred Thiel mentioned in a recent press statement .
The CEO acknowledged the majority of the surge to Marathon’e proprietary software in a recent interview. The software gives Marathon the “ability to control the output of the machines, the uptime of the machines, scaling up and down the hash rate of the machines,” he reiterated
Marathon utilizes its own mining pool, “which means that there can be fluctuations in bitcoin production to the expected value,” said Ethan Vera, chief operating officer at mining services firm Luxor Technologies.
Recently in may, miners saw an uptick in revenues thanks to higher transaction fees due to popularity of Ordinals. The protocol enabled added functionality on the bitcoin blockchain, such as non-fungible tokens and memecoins, driving up demand for block space. As a result, fees miners rake in for processing transactions surpassed block rewards in early May.
“Ordinals significantly helped large scale miners like Marathon,” said Vera.
However we can equally attribute the 77% increase in the marathon bitcoin production in may to the reason that machines were not fully functioning in April, and it predominantly had a lot of room to add up it’s production in the next month
The miner said in April that its monthly 15% decrease in bitcoin production was due to increased difficulty on the network, luck and “to a lesser extent, curtailment activity.”
Marathon in the last month produced markedly little bitcoin per exahash, which can be partly attributed to downtime of its mining machines.. Marathon shares on the Nasdaq were flat recently, outperforming some of the peers while bitcoin rose about 1.3%.