Public companies are continuing to buy up large stashes of bitcoin-four-minute-instant-guide-explainer" target="_blank" class="sc-adb616fe-0 bJsyml" rel="nofollow">Bitcoin near the top.
Top Bitcoin miner MARA, formerly known as Marathon Digital, announced Tuesday that it had snapped up 11,774 Bitcoin for $1.1 billion. That’s an average price of $96,000 per coin.
Bitcoin hit an all-time high last week of $103,607 after crossing the long-anticipated $100,000 mark. However, it has cooled off in the last day, currently sitting at a price of about $96,300 as of this writing after rebounding from a price below $95,000.
MARA—which trades on the Nasdaq under the same ticker—said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it now holds 40,435 Bitcoin. At the current price, the company’s holdings are now worth nearly $3.9 billion.
MARA’s stock is down by almost 4% so far today, trading hands for about $23. Over a six month period, it has risen by 18%.
The miner is following in the footsteps of software company MicroStrategy, raising money via private offerings to buy Bitcoin.
MARA is the second-biggest publicly traded holder of Bitcoin after MicroStrategy—which holds more than 10 times the amount of Bitcoin: a total of 423,650 coins worth over $40 billion.
The company is in the business of minting new coins: Bitcoin miners work to process transactions on the blockchain so the people can send value across the crypto network.
Miners—which are typically huge industrial operations that use a lot of electricity—are rewarded with Bitcoin for their work.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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