This week, The Mining Pod headed down to Houston for the annual ‘Energizing Bitcoin’ conference hosted by the gang at Digital Wildcatters.
Mostly consisting of energy talks, Marathon Digital stole the show this week by not only creating a block with it’s signature ‘M’ logo in a Bitcoin block, but also releasing both a 2 phase immersion Bitcoin mining setup and a new control board.
Control boards allow for additional management of Bitcoin miners and specialized firmware to increase Bitcoin output per machine.
2 Phase immersion uses liquids to cool Bitcoin mining ASICs. Heat from the ASIC chips vaporizes the liquid, with the gas then circulated out of the enclosure. Once cooled, the gas re-enters the system as a liquid to cool the ASICs again.
Listen: The Largest Immersion Mine In North America
Between Ordinals infrastructure, new immersion tech, and control boards, we’d say Marathon is living up to its ideal of a completely vertically integrated Bitcoin miner.
What comes next? Likely a lot of Marathon Digital salesman for its mining products (immersion, control boards); perhaps a good revenue diversification play going into halving if they sell units. However, there is a lot of skepticism around 2 Phase immersion mining, not to mention the mining firmware game is fairly dominated by one big operator, Vnish.
For Marathon’s more bespoke mining activities like Ordinals and blocktemplate construction, we’d put our money on Marathon cooking up partnerships with NFT collections, exchange UTXO consolidation, and entertainment similar to the recent French Montana announcement. That part of the market is ripe for picking.
Marathon has all the world to gain by getting celebrities and the like to shill its logo across Instagram.
