MARA Bitcoin Mining Costs Reach $62,862 Per Coin, With Electricity Costs at $39,674

Coin Circle (120btc.CoM): On November 10, Beijing time, MARA Holdings, a leading Bitcoin mining company listed on NASDAQ, released its financial report for the third quarter of 2026, detailing the micro-energy expenditure structure for mining a single Bitcoin. The data shows that during the reporting period, the company's electricity purchase cost for its own mining sites was $39,674, approaching the $40,000 mark. It should be noted that this data only reflects the recurring energy procurement expenditures directly paid to public electricity suppliers and does not represent the company's complete comprehensive mining costs.

Industry tracking agency CryptoQuant's CEO Ki Young Ju conducted a secondary calculation based on MARA's comprehensive income statement, estimating that the company's average comprehensive mining cost per BTC for the quarter reached $62,862. This significant discrepancy in metrics reveals the complexity of actual operational expenditures for mining companies:

• Limitations of the electricity purchase metric: This metric only covers the basic electricity costs paid to the power supplier, divided by the number of Bitcoins actually produced by the owned mining sites, and does not include outsourcing expenses for third-party mining sites, nor does it account for hardware depreciation, daily management expenses, and debt financing costs;

• Electricity price and network difficulty disparity: Although MARA's average electricity cost for its own mining sites remained relatively low at about $0.04 per kilowatt-hour during the quarter, the direct electricity purchase cost per token still saw a slight year-on-year increase of about 1%. The core reason lies in the fact that the expansion rate of network mining difficulty is significantly faster than its own hash rate growth, and simply low electricity prices cannot offset the marginal cost increase caused by the dilution of block generation probability;

• Multiple pressures on operational expenditures: The company recorded direct electricity purchase expenses of $48.124 million for the third quarter, but third-party hosting and other energy expenses reached $71.511 million, with on-site operations and equipment maintenance expenses amounting to another $21.481 million, highlighting the additional cash flow consumption from outsourced capacity.

In terms of measuring daily hash rate operational efficiency, MARA's daily operational expenditure per PH/s of hash rate recorded $30.8, showing a slight year-on-year improvement of about 2%. This metric comprehensively includes energy procurement, outsourced hosting, and on-site operational cash consumption. However, maintaining power to the mining machines and recovering full-cycle capital investments still represent fundamentally different challenges. The financial report shows that during the period, the consolidated income statement separately accounted for depreciation and amortization of about $151 million, general and administrative expenses of $75.815 million, and interest expenses of $13.472 million. For large mining entities, timely payment of current electricity costs, maintaining daily operations of mining sites, and fully recovering heavy asset equipment investments and financing interest constitute three progressively layered profit thresholds.

On-Site Power Capacity Expansion of 18%

In terms of hardware infrastructure and capacity reserves, as of the end of the third quarter, MARA's connected power capacity reached 71.2 EH/s, achieving an 18% scale expansion compared to the same period last year. However, this data represents the theoretical load limit of physical devices connected to the grid, which includes some idle hash power that is temporarily offline due to scheduling or maintenance, and cannot be equated to the actual effective average hash rate maintained at high load throughout the quarter.

On the actual output side, the apparent expansion of hash rate capacity has not linearly translated into token increments:

• Total output shows a sequential weakening: The company actually produced 2,247 Bitcoins during the quarter, which, although showing a slight year-on-year increase of 5% due to last year's low base, represented a significant decline of 7% compared to the second quarter of this year;

• Extreme weather conditions limit operational rates: Management pointed out in the operational report that its core mining site in Texas, USA, faced extreme temperature disturbances in the summer, frequently triggering shutdowns due to grid demand response and high-temperature power restrictions, severely reducing actual online block generation time;

• Divergence between theoretical capacity and effective output: The intensifying competition across the network, fluctuations in machine online rates, and variance in block generation results are all diluting the benefits of hardware expansion, indicating that simply piling up nominal hash rates cannot directly convert into proportional on-chain settlement results.

Apparent Fair Value Gains Support Net Profit Figures

On the profit and loss statement, MARA exhibits a high reliance on asset revaluation as a financial characteristic. Shareholder letters indicate that the net profit attributable to common shareholders for the third quarter reached $634 million, but this primarily stemmed from the recognition of fair value change gains of approximately $885 million, which included the market value revaluation of underlying digital assets and receivables.

Accompanying the impressive net profit figures are signs of pressure on the entity's business cash generation capacity:

• Significant decline in main revenue: The company's revenue shrank by 35% year-on-year to $164 million, indicating that the explosive growth in the profit statement did not arise from substantial compression of mining costs per coin or a leap in core business cash generation, but rather from a temporary uplift in the balance sheet due to the recovery of Bitcoin secondary market valuations;

• Post-quarter liquidation of spot holdings to replenish liquidity: After the third quarter settlement, the company sold 13,597 Bitcoins at an average market price of approximately $81,039, cashing out about $1.1 billion;

• Unpledging to reduce liquidity exposure: Management utilized $750 million of the cash from the aforementioned liquidation to fully repay $750 million of pledged loans, successfully unfreezing and recovering 17,477 Bitcoins that were previously used as collateral. This operation represents a typical post-quarter defensive rebalancing of the balance sheet, rather than actual mining operating income generated during the quarter.

By liquidating part of the appreciated assets for cash, MARA has completely mitigated the risks of margin calls and forced liquidations that may arise from collateralized loans during price declines, improving financial flexibility; however, this financial engineering operation has not fundamentally reduced the rigid electricity procurement and physical operational consumption required for mining each Bitcoin. Whether the company can convert the capital buffer from spot holdings into sustainable operating cash flow will still heavily depend on its efficiency in utilizing power resources and the output capacity per unit of hash rate.

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