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MARA Holdings, the Bitcoin miner previously known as Marathon Digital Holdings, reported third-quarter net income of $632.1 million, or $1.28 per diluted share. A year earlier, the same quarter produced $123.1 million.
Most of the profit came from Bitcoin the company holds, not from the Bitcoin it mined and sold.
Then came the bigger move. After the quarter closed, MARA sold 13,597 Bitcoin for around $1.1 billion and steered most of that cash toward its debt.
A profit built on mark-to-market math
The results, released on November 9, show an $885.3 million unrealized fair-value gain on digital assets. Accounting rules let companies count the rising value of crypto they hold as income, even if they never sell it.
Revenue tells a less flattering story. It fell 35% year-over-year to $164.2 million, down from $252.4 million in the prior-year quarter.
MARA’s average Bitcoin price realization dropped 37%, even as the company produced more coins and ran its machines more efficiently.
MARA mined 2,247 Bitcoin during the quarter. Its hashrate, a measure of how much computing power it throws at mining, reached 71.2 EH/s, up 18% from a year earlier.
As of September 30, the company held 34,012 Bitcoin, including receivables. Cash and equivalents stood at $946.5 million.
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Selling Bitcoin to shrink the debt pile
The post-quarter sale is the part worth reading twice. MARA offloaded 13,597 Bitcoin for roughly $1.1 billion, which works out to an approximate price of $81,039 per coin.
Of those proceeds, $750 million went to repaying term loans that were backed by Bitcoin. Repaying those loans freed between 17,477 and 18,750 BTC from collateral.
After the repayment, MARA’s pledged Bitcoin dropped to less than 5% of its total holdings.
The company has been cutting debt all year. MARA has reduced its debt by $1.4 billion, or 37%, since the start of the year.
Alongside the sale, MARA announced a share repurchase program worth up to $500 million.
The pivot beyond mining
MARA is also continuing its push into artificial intelligence and high-performance computing infrastructure.
The company approved a strategic acquisition of the Long Ridge natural gas plant. It also secured a $79 million GPU-as-a-service contract through Exaion.
What this means for MARA and its shareholders
The quarter highlights a split personality that public Bitcoin miners increasingly have. One half is an operating business that earns revenue from mining. The other half is a Bitcoin treasury whose value swings with the market.
This time, the treasury half did the heavy lifting. The $885.3 million fair-value gain dwarfed the $164.2 million in revenue, which means headline profit is tightly linked to where Bitcoin trades at quarter-end.
The 37% drop in realized Bitcoin price is the number to watch. Production rose and efficiency improved, yet revenue still fell by more than a third.
Contracts like the $79 million Exaion deal offer income that does not move in lockstep with Bitcoin, which could smooth out earnings over time.
