North American mining firm Marathon has completed a $200mln fundraising drive that will be used to pay for miners bought from Bitmain.
The company announced the completion of its $200mln shelf offering through an at-the-market (ATM) facility and the fundraising round has left Marathon with $217.6mln in cash at the end of the 2020 fiscal year.
Marathon confirmed that it will use the funds raised to pay for miners it purchased from Chinese manufacturer Bitmain. The firm has bought a total of 103,060 miners to date and expects to produce 10.36 EH/s once all of their miners have been delivered and deployed in 2021.
15,000 miners to be delivered in 2021
Marathon is expecting the mining equipment it has purchased from Bitmain to arrive in separate shipments in the first half of 2021. The company hpp[es to install 4,000 units in February, 6,300 in March and a further 4,800 in April.
The company owed Bitmain $163mln after paying an initial deposit for the miners which had been ordered in 2020. Marathon’s CEO Merrick Okamoto said the capital raising initiative was integral in ensuring it meets its obligations to Bitmain.
“We operate in a volatile industry in which prescient timing and scale are paramount to efficiently driving profitability. The unique relationship we have built with Bitmain allowed us to secure a record number of miners, which because of the substantial increase in Bitcoin’s price and subsequent increase in demand for mining rigs, are now being sold in secondary markets at multiples of our purchase price,” Okamoto said in a statement.
The Marathon CEO also offered a compelling estimation of the company’s potential earnings if it were able to install its miners immediately.
“According to publicly available Bitcoin profit calculators, if all the miners we have purchased were deployed today, and Bitcoin’s price were $28,000/BTC, we would produce approximately $618 million in revenue annually and approximately $523 million in gross profit annually. Marathon is clearly on a path to become one of the largest miners in North America, and this capital raise indicates that we are not only gaining important scale, but we are doing so effectively and efficiently,” Okamoto added.
