Miner Weekly: Marathon Eyes $1.5B Offering after Raising $750M
Top three miners have raised $1.6b since October via stock offerings
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This article first appeared in Miner Weekly, BlocksBridge Consulting’s weekly newsletter curating the latest news in bitcoin mining and data analysis from TheMinerMag. Subscribe to receive in your inbox once a week.
Bitcoin is not the only thing that is rallying – so are stock offerings by publicly traded mining companies.
Riot said over the past week that it received $115 million in Q1 so far via stock offerings after raising more than $500 million in equity in Q4.
On Wednesday, Marathon provided its annual report for 2023 and said that as of Dec. 31, it had raised $248.1 million from its 2023 at-the-market (ATM) offering program since October, which had a cap of raising $750 million.
After Dec. 31, Marathon sold additional shares under the 2023 ATM to reach the maximum limit, implying that it has raised an additional $500 million year-to-date.
Marathon added that it plans to start a new ATM offering program in February with another maximum offering of $1.5 billion.
All told, the top three bitcoin mining stocks by market capitalization – Marathon, Riot, and CleanSpark – raised $880 million in Q4 and $739 million in the first two months of 2024. Others like HIVE and Iris Energy also continued to raise additional funds since the New Year, as noted in the previous issue.
A majority of the raised funds by these major public mining companies will be used to pay for miner commitments and infrastructure buildout during 2024 and 2025.
CleanSpark doubled down on its preorders of Bitmain’s Antminer S21s in early January. Riot made another purchase of MicroBT’s WhatsMiners this week to replace and upgrade its existing fleet.
It appears that Riot aims to switch gears toward MicroBT’s products as some of its existing Antminers have been causing issues.
Marathon recently closed the acquisition of two sites from Generate Capital to become more vertically integrated, dropping the asset-light model that it boasted during the last cycle.
Marathon has not yet made any significant miner purchases from Bitmain or MicroBT. However, in September, it paid $15 million to its portfolio company Auradine to secure certain rights to future purchases of Auradine’s bitcoin ASIC miners. It’d be interesting to see how that will play out this year and whether Auradine will rise as a serious rival to Bitmain and MicroBT.
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