Mara

StarkWare's transaction is nonstandard under Bitcoin Core's relay rules, so MARA had to mine it directly. Hours of computation and up to $200 went into moving 10,000 satoshis.

The $600 million in new loans from Coinbase and Two Prime is earmarked for Long Ridge, a 505 MW Ohio site MARA wants to expand toward two gigawatts for AI hosting.

Bitcoin difficulty dropped from 138.96T to 124.93T at block 953,568 on June 14, the second-largest negative adjustment of the year. Hashrate is down 12% in a month to 886 EH/s, and the marginal kilowatt is increasingly being sold to AI hyperscalers instead.

The second-largest difficulty cut of 2026 reflects what miner earnings have been telegraphing all year: Marathon, Riot and their peers are pulling power and capital out of bitcoin mining and into AI data centres as fast as the contracts can be signed.

The May 1 difficulty adjustment dropped to 132.47 trillion after sustained hashrate fell below the symbolic one-zettahash threshold for the first time since February. The dip says more about how public miners are reallocating capex than about network security.

CoinShares' Q1 2026 mining report reveals that production costs have surged to $80,000 per bitcoin while hash prices hit five-year lows, accelerating a historic pivot toward AI infrastructure that could see listed miners derive the majority of revenue from artificial intelligence by year-end.