The world's largest publicly traded bitcoin miner, American Marathon Digital, announced Kaspa mining operations. This is being done to diversify income. At the same time, the company has no plans to abandon bitcoin mining; on the contrary, BTC occupies the absolute majority in crypto mining. Why did the company, as an industry leader, become interested in Kaspa?
There are several reasons why Marathon Digital has taken an interest in Kaspa:
- The company aims to expand its sources of profit without relying solely on bitcoin mining. Thus, as they reported, this is being done to diversify income.
- Marathon notes "higher profits" when mining Kaspa. In some cases, margins can reach 95%.
- Marathon says it is in a “unique position” to mine Kaspa due to its ability to configure ASIC miners to mine the cryptocurrency.
- Since September 2023, when Marathon began mining Kaspa, the value of the KAS token has climbed 420%, while bitcoin is up only about 130%. For the miner, the benefits are obvious.
- No more than 1% of the company’s mining capacity is allocated to Kaspa mining, which makes it possible to experiment with minimal risks.
As for the prospects of Kaspa, despite Forbes' inclusion in the list of “zombie blockchains” in April, there are factors that may point to the potential of this cryptocurrency:
- Kaspa runs on innovative BlockDAG technology, allowing blocks to be processed in parallel, thereby significantly speeding up transactions.
- Kaspa is the fifth-largest proof-of-work network with a capitalization of over $4 bln.
- KAS is up 53% year-to-date, while bitcoin is 44% higher, highlighting investor interest.
Kaspa is a relatively young project (launched in May 2022) and it may take time for the ecosystem to develop. Support from companies like Marathon Digital can help further the project’s development. Kaspa's innovative approach to solving scalability issues may lead to increased usage in the future. However, it should be noted that Kaspa is still far from being able to compete with bitcoin. Bitcoin has 700,000 - 1,000,000 unique active daily addresses, whereas Kaspa has only about 20,000. Bitcoin has proven its viability in the long term, while Kaspa has not.