Why Marathon Is Comfortable With Bitcoin Plunging, Says BEP Is $6,500

Marathon Digital Holdings’ (MARA) Fred Thiel said that Bitcoin price would need to drop 80% for the coin to stop being profitable for the company thus entering a challenging situation. Marathon is not worried about the past week’s dip.

During a Bloomberg QuickTake Stock interview, Fred Thiel, Las Vegas-based company’s chief executive officer of Marathon, expressed assurance for Bitcoin’s future and stated that Bitcoin mining is “obviously a very profitable business” and the company can “ride this market for quite a long time.”

Thiel expressed that, factoring operational mining costs (energy plus hosting), Bitcoin’s breakeven rate is roughly $6,500, meaning that the digital coin would need to drop at least 80% for Marathon to face challenging difficulties, so the price of Bitcoin plunging under $60,000 still translates into profits for them.

What’s not in that cost, if you would, is the depreciation in the miners that we buy. We depreciate our miners over five years, so the payback on that is less than a year at today’s margins. (…) We are a very small team from an operational overhead perspective, so that gets covered very quickly.

Thiel stated those costs are a very comfortable place for the company to be at and believes that Marathon is “one of the most efficient miners in the industry today” because of their agile model that focused on investing in “the miners that produce the maximum return”.

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Amidst Bitcoin’s bumpy week, speculative comments on social media say that many miners have been selling their BTC the past few days. Bloomberg reporters asked Thiel about the company’s own decision after seeing that the coin dropped below 60k. Thiel responded that they are a long-term holder of Bitcoin and are not planning on selling.

We went into the market in January and bought $150 million of Bitcoin and investment has paid off very handsomely for us. We bought it at an average price of $31,000. So Bitcoin where it is today has paid off very nicely. But we intend to be a long-term holder.

Thiel shared the company is optimistic about Bitcoin’s future. They firmly believe that “as a limited supply asset” its value and popularity will keep on rising, and the daily headlines “about new use cases and more uses” backs that optimism.

He also called the U.S. “a very interesting center for Bitcoin mining” because of its excess of energy, opposed to Europe’s situation, and explained that “Some Bitcoin miners need to sell their Bitcoin holdings just to cover their operations”, not worried about the speculations.

Related Reading | Bitcoin Mining Raises Marathon Digital’s BTC Holds To $457M

After Marathon’s debt increase of $150 million that aggregates to the previous $500 million offering size, Thiel shared the decision was taken in order to have “cash on the balance sheet” and stay in “a position of liquidity” so they can potentially take advantage of opportunities in the marketplace that could accelerate their growth, like buying more miners, miner companies that could grow their mining capacity, or invest on improving their mining operation’s energy efficiency.

He further stated that the company is not interested in using the bonds to buy Bitcoin in the open market because they produce it, “unless there are some pricing opportunities” like a $10,000 drop, but they would still be carefully looking into the projections since they want to be “very good custodians” of their shareholders’ capital.