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Kaspa grows as Marathon Digital extracts $16 million from KAS to diversify revenue
KAS, the native proof-of-work cryptocurrency token Kasparose 13% after major Bitcoin mining company Marathon Digital revealed it had mined more than $16 million worth of tokens to diversify away from Bitcoin.
Digital marathon announced on June 26 that the deal allows the company to “capitalize on the higher margins” achievable with Kaspa mining machines, which in some cases can reach up to 95%.
Today we are announcing that we have started mining on Kaspa.
Diversification has been central to our investments in energy solutions and technology innovations and remains crucial in our digital asset computing operations. Read the full press release: https://t.co/rwiXIJCx7q
— MARA (@MarathonDH) June 26, 2024
At the time of writing, KAS has seen a 145% increase in trading volume and a 10% increase in price over the past 24 hours. The cryptoasset is up 20% in the last 7 days and 26% in the last 30 days, indicating an optimistic outlook for the altcoin this month.
According to data from CoinMarketCap, Kaspa is now ranked 24th on the global list of cryptocurrencies, with a trading price of $0.1759, a circulating supply of approximately 24.035 billion KAS tokens and a market capitalization of 4.2 billion of dollars.
24 hour KAS price chart | Source: CoinMarketCap
Kaspa is a cryptocurrency that aims to provide a high-performance, scalable and secure blockchain platform.
The Layer-1 protocol’s defining feature is its use of the GhostDAG protocol, a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism that enables faster block times and higher transaction throughput than typical blockchains.
Unlike Bitcoin, GhostDAG allows the production of multiple blocks at once. According to Marathon, this approach speeds up transactions and increases block rewards for miners.
Adam Swick, Marathon’s chief growth officer, said that Kaspa mining allows the company to create a diversified revenue stream from Bitcoin, noting that it is “directly tied to [their] key skills in the calculation of digital assets”.
Marathon began mining Kaspa in September last year after putting the first mining computer online.
The Bitcoin mining giant purchased around 60 petahash of KS3, KS5 and KS5 Pro ASICs to mine Kaspa tokens. Half of this is now operational, with the remainder to be deployed in the third quarter.
The company mined 93 million KAS, with an estimated value of approximately $16 million.
The price of the Kaspa token has increased by around 50% this year, while the price of Bitcoin has increased by 44%.
Bitcoin miners have been looking for ways to diversify their income during the cryptocurrency winter, and the latest halving has increased competition. Many miners did this have transitioned to using existing infrastructure to support artificial intelligence (AI) and other computational needs.
Meanwhile, some miners, like Marathon, have chosen to leverage additional layers of Bitcoin to increase their earnings.