Mara Holdings, one of the largest publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies in the United States, significantly increased BTC production in May despite growing mining difficulty and rising hashrate.
Mara produced 950 Bitcoin (BTC) in the month of May, recording a 35% increase month-over-month (MoM), the company reported in its unaudited BTC production update published June 3.
The mining company also posted a record high 282 blocks earned last month, a 38% increase MoM.
With its latest BTC production, Mara has increased its Bitcoin holdings to 49,179 BTC, worth roughly $5.2 billion at the time of writing, according to data from CoinGecko.
Zero Bitcoin sold
According to MARA’s chief financial officer, Salman Khan, the company saw a record production month in May and has sold no Bitcoin.
“One of our biggest competitive advantages? Operating our own mining pool,” Khan wrote in an X post on June 3.
Mara Chairman and CEO Fred Thiel noted that the company’s May Bitcoin production was the biggest since the halving event that took place in April 2024.
The significance of operating a pool
According to Thiel, Mara’s fully integrated tech stack is a “key differentiator,” as the company is the “only self-owned and operated mining pool among public miners.”
“Operating our pool means no fees to external operators and retention of the full value of block rewards.”
The CEO added that May’s production benefited from block reward luck. “Since launch, MARA Pool’s block reward luck has outperformed the network average by over 10%, contributing to our industry-leading block production.”
Rising hashrate and difficulty
Mara’s record mining update comes despite Bitcoin mining becoming more difficult.
Bitcoin hashrate, an indicator referring to the total computational power used by miners to solve complex math problems and verify Bitcoin transactions on the network, has been surging to all-time high levels in the past few months.
Related: MARA’s Bitcoin mining revenue hits record $752M as BTC price soars
According to data from Blockchain.com, BTC hashrate topped at 942 exahashes per second (EH/s) on May 31.
Bitcoin mining difficulty — a measure of how hard it is to solve the math problems to add new blocks — has also been on the rise.
According to Blockchain.com, the BTC mining difficulty rate surged past 126 trillion in another upward adjustment on May 30.
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