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For those looking for indirect bitcoin exposure or value investment bitcoin opportunities in the public markets, holding North American bitcoin miner equity is where to get it.
Of the top-four publicly-traded North American miners (Marathon Digital Holdings, HUT 8 Mining, Riot Blockchain, Inc and HIVE Blockchain Technologies), average YTD returns are up to 140%, versus bitcoin returns of 49%. HODLing bitcoin still remains the best long-term option for most, but we’re clearly seeing a trend of effective bitcoin miners outperforming bitcoin returns over the last two years.As the Bitcoin network bootstraps around the world, miner revenue (in USD terms) continues to rise.
Source: TradingView
Zooming out to include the start of 2020, average returns across these miners are 5.2 times above bitcoin’s returns of 464%. Collectively they hold a $9.18 billion market cap.
Source: TradingView
When we take a deeper look at quarterly and monthly miner updates, we see a broader narrative forming with the most successful miners trying to do two things — rapidly scale up production, and increase their HODLing supply.
Looking at Marathon, its monthly bitcoin production increased 6% in August bringing its total bitcoin holdings to 6,695 BTC. Of its bitcoin holdings, 4,812 BTC were purchased in January 2021 for an average price of $31,168. Like many bitcoin miners, Marathon continues to expand its bitcoin treasury, keeping the business well capitalized and ready to deploy the assets if ever needed.
Source: Marathon Sep 2021 IR Presentation
As of August 31, Riot held approximately 3,128 BTC, all of which were produced by its self-mining operations. By Q4 2022, Riot anticipates achieving a total hash rate capacity of 7.7 EH/s with a fully-deployed mining fleet of 81,146 Antminers. Marathon also expects to have a mining fleet of 133,000 machines deployed by the middle of next year, and they look to be on track with 21,584 miners secured as of September 1.
