Riot Platforms boosts bitcoin mining production by 19% in June as Marathon Digital sees slight decline

Bitcoin mining firms across the industry have released statistics detailing their mining activity and energy consumption in June, as the companies continue to respond to the dramatic shift from April's halving event with greater investment in the latest-generation infrastructure and long-term energy procurement deals.

Riot Platforms managed to outperform its bitcoin mining activity from May with a 19% increase in the number of bitcoin mined month-over-month, earning 255 BTC in June compared to 215 BTC in May. However, the company only mined about half as many bitcoin as the same period last year, as expected following bitcoin's halving event this past April.

Riot, in its filing, said the company surpassed its second-quarter power target of 21.4 exahash per second (EH/s), achieving 22.0 EH/s as of the end of the month. Riot also announced it received $6.2 million in power credits from the Texas power grid, a slight decrease from the prior month, and is targeting a total self-mining hash rate capacity of 31 EH/s by the end of the year.

Fellow mining companies Bitfarms and CleanSpark also managed to increase the number of bitcoins the company mined month-over-month.

Modest gains for Cipher

Cipher Mining in June continued its 30-megawatt expansions of its Texas data centers known as Bear and Chief Mountain.

"At Bear we have now received and installed all the new mining rigs, and we expect to finish installing the remainder of the new mining rigs at Chief later this month," said CEO Tyler Page in the company's filing.

Cipher produced 176 bitcoin in June, a modest 6% increase from the 166 bitcoin the company mined in May, and sold 103 bitcoin, ending the month with a balance of approximately 2,209 bitcoin.

Small losses for Marathon, Bitdeer

Marathon saw a small 4% decrease in total bitcoin mined month-over-month, earning 590 BTC compared to 616 in May. However, the filing notes Marathon's attempts to optimize its operations with latest-generation machines and cooling systems and "remain[s] on track to reach our target of 50 EH/s by the end of this year," according to Marathon chairman and CEO Fred Thiel.

"One particular transaction generated a fee of 0.85 BTC compared to the average of approximately 0.15 BTC, primarily due to our technology advantage, most notably Slipstream," Thiel said in the filing. Slipstream allows Marathon to process large or non-standard Bitcoin transactions that other miners may ignore.

The company now holds 18,536 BTC, up from 17,857 the prior month.

Bitdeer, the U.S.-listed mining company owned by Chinese billionaire Jihan Wu, also reported a slight decrease in the number of bitcoins mined. The company earned 179 BTC from self-mining in June compared to 184 in May, a 2.7% decrease, though the company noted in its filing that "AI cloud services powered by NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with H100 system demonstrated strong demand by customers and crossed 75% utilization during the month."

The company remains on track to hit its proprietary hash rate target of 11.8 EH/s by the year's end through the deployment of additional processors in its Texas and Tydal, Norway facilities.

The price of bitcoin has fallen about 2.75% over the past 24 hours at publication time to reach a price of $60,218, according to The Block's bitcoin price page.