Marathon Digital Mines 16 million dollars in Bitcoin to separate
Bitcoin (BTC) mining heavyweight Marathon Digital has announced it will issue $16 million worth of Caspa (KAS) — a token designed to address Bitcoin's scalability problem — to convert from bitcoin starting in September.
In a June 26 announcement, Marathon Digital said the move allowed the company to “capture higher margins” on Caspa mining machines, in some cases up to 95%.
“By mining Casp, we can create a separate revenue stream from Bitcoin,” said Adam Swick, Marathon's chief development officer.
“Marathon was uniquely positioned to take advantage of the huge potential for Kaspa and those who can deploy Kaspa ASICs today.”
After deploying the first KASPA miners in September 2023, Marathon issued 93 million KAS tokens. Since then, KAS tokens have increased by 420%, while Bitcoin has increased by 135%.
Marathon has purchased approximately 60 KS3, KS5 and KS5 Pro ASICs with CASPA tokens. Half are currently operational and the rest will be installed in the third quarter.
Caspa Mining is not a pillar.
However, Marathon's vice president of investor relations, Robert Samuels, emphasized that the miner is not shifting its main focus from bitcoin.
“Caspa represents only 1% of our energy capacity if fully deployed,” Samuel said in a June 26 X post.
“Let's try and test it another way. To say ‘forced' is wrong and irresponsible.”
Marathon had mined 9,761 bitcoins — $594.9 million — as of September, meaning that Caspa mining accounted for only a small fraction of the company's total mining revenue.
Despite this, KAS tokens have risen 2.4% since Marathon broke the news, pushing its price and Marathon's total KAS stack to $0.172 and $16 million, respectively.
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According to CoinGecko data, Caspa is the fifth largest proof-of-work cryptocurrency with a market cap of $4.1 billion. With 24 billion KAS tokens in circulation, the supply will reach 28.7 billion.
Like Bitcoin, the network's native token, KAS, is a Layer-1 protocol that facilitates transfers.
However, Caspa uses a direct acyclic graph-derived architecture – a “BlockDAG” – where blocks are added to the network one at a time instead of linearly.
It results in a faster block speed – 1 block per second – which is orders of magnitude faster than Bitcoin, which takes around 10 minutes to build a block.
Caspa is far from being a Bitcoin competitor, however. Bitcoin currently has between 700,000 and 1 million unique active addresses that interact with the network every day, with Casp hovering around the 20,000 mark.
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