MARA and CleanSpark Post a Combined $851M Quarterly Loss

MARA Holdings and CleanSpark, two of the largest listed bitcoin miners, reported quarterly results that together came to roughly $851 million in net losses, on revenue declines of more than a quarter at both companies. MARA posted a second-quarter net loss of $611.3 million, or $1.60 per diluted share, on revenue of $174.9 million, down 27% from $238.5 million a year earlier and about 16% short of estimates. Analysts had expected a profit of $0.35 a share. CleanSpark, whose fiscal third quarter ended on 30 June, posted a net loss of $239.8 million, or $0.89 per basic share, on revenue of $138.0 million, down 30.5% from $198.6 million. The market graded both on the day. MARA shares fell more than 5% to $10.67, CleanSpark more than 6% to $12.69, and both managements pointed to artificial-intelligence and data-center work, not mining, as the source of future growth.

Two different kinds of loss

Much of each headline loss is an accounting revaluation rather than cash out of the door. Of MARA's $611.3 million, $343 million was an unrealized mark-to-market loss on digital assets, meaning the company wrote down the carrying value of bitcoin it still holds under fair-value accounting. At CleanSpark, $116.3 million of the $239.8 million was a fair-value loss on bitcoin. The same mechanism produced Strategy's $8.2B loss on its bitcoin holdings a week earlier, and it reverses if the price recovers. The operating picture underneath does not reverse. MARA's adjusted EBITDA was negative $360.9 million against positive $1.2 billion a year ago, and CleanSpark's was negative $113.0 million against positive $377.7 million.

The pivot: 4.8 GW at MARA, 1.8 GW at CleanSpark

Fred Thiel, MARA's chairman and chief executive, framed mining as the base, not the business. "Bitcoin mining provided the foundation," he said. "We believe digital Infrastructure...will expand the value we create from that foundation." MARA is completing its acquisition of Long Ridge and buying a 2 GW facility in Matagorda County, Texas, which would take its total to 4.8 GW. Gary Vecchiarelli, CleanSpark's president, made a similar argument: "Despite currently challenging bitcoin mining economics, we have a portfolio of scarce, grid-connected power assets and multiple pathways to commercialization." CleanSpark reported 1.8 GW or more of controllable power, and chairman and chief executive Matt Schultz said in July that its first high-performance computing data-center lease, at the Sandersville campus, resulted in $6.6 billion of contracted revenue.

More hashrate, less revenue

The revenue declines did not come from mining less. MARA produced 2,422 BTC in the quarter, up 3%, on energized hashrate of 70.3 EH/s, up 22%, while cutting its cost per petahash per day to $27.7, down 4%. CleanSpark mined 586 BTC in July on average operating hashrate of 38.6 EH/s, peaking at 50 EH/s. Revenue per unit of work is falling faster than the operators can add machines, and the network is not helping. Difficulty stood at 126.23T on 6 August, unchanged, with the next retarget due on 8 August. Pickaxe put that adjustment at roughly +0.85%. Hashrate Index's 3 August roundup had it at +0.67%, and the two estimates do not reconcile; we could not establish which will prove closer. The same split runs through network hashrate, at about 855 EH/s in Pickaxe's reading against Hashrate Index's 7-day average of 932 EH/s.

Selling coin to fund the build

Both companies are financing the pivot partly from the bitcoin they mined. MARA sold 2,213 BTC at an average of about $73,078 during the quarter and ended with 35,577 BTC, worth roughly $2.1 billion and down 29% from 49,951 a year earlier. CleanSpark held 13,924 BTC, alongside $202.6 million of cash and $814.9 million of bitcoin against total assets of $2.7 billion. Its July operational update gave a slightly different count, 13,931 BTC as of 31 July, a small discrepancy that sits across two as-of dates. The variable that would fix mining economics is the bitcoin price, and it has been conspicuously still, with implied volatility at a ten-week low earlier in the week, according to CoinDesk's daybook. Until either the price moves or the data-center contracts start converting into reported revenue, the sector's quarterly prints are likely to keep looking like these two.