Bitcoin miner MaRA transferred 298 BTC to Cumberland, a move that can be linked to the company’s new position in BTC sales.
MARA Just Opened the Door to Bitcoin Sales
According to on-chain analytics company CryptoQuant, mining company MARA has recently issued a Bitcoin wallet. The transaction came nine days after the company said in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it expanded its digital asset management strategy to allow sales from BTC held on its balance sheet.
Historically, a miner holds on to BTC that he has mined and bought more tokens from his wealth. Last year, however, it changed its strategy to allow the sale of tokens produced through its mining operations. The expansion from the beginning of this month has continued this policy.
Considering that the miner is open to sell Bitcoin now, the latest transaction of output from its reserve could be significant.
The data for the outflow transactions made by MARA | Source: CryptoQuant on X
As shown in the graph above, this transaction involved about 298 BTC (worth $21 million at the moment). According to CryptoQuant, the move was to Cumberland, a digital asset liquidity platform aimed at institutional organizations.
MARA’s change came as the company pushed into the AI data space and amid a bearish slump in the cryptocurrency sector. Mining Bitcoin is an energy-intensive process, so all miners must pay regular operating costs in the form of electricity bills. Whether or not miners can make a profit from their operations depends on the value of the tokens they are mined, which tends to decrease during bearish markets.
Based on the MARA input, CryptoQuant estimated the average cost of BTC mining.
Looks like the figure has climbed up over the years | Source: CryptoQuant on X
From the chart, it can be seen that data from MARA’s filings puts the average cost of mining a Bitcoin at $70,027. The price of the cryptocurrency space is currently hanging at this mark, so the company will be breaking its performance.
Some miners may operate at a cheaper cost, depending on the efficiency of their hardware and their energy costs. “The most efficient operations (new hardware + low power) can mine Bitcoin for ~$45K per BTC,” the analyst firm noted.
MARA is not the only Bitcoin miner who has been looking at the field of AI as a lucrative opportunity. Many major mining companies such as Bitfarms and Cango have been pivoting into the high-performance computing (HPC) business.
BTC price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $70,700, down 3.5% from last week.
The trend in the price of the coin over the last five days | Source: BTCUSDT on TradingView
Featured image from Dall-E, chart from TradingView.com
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