Hashrate Happy Hour Podcast: Ep. 41 - Asset Light Bitcoin Mining w/ Adam Swick of Marathon Digital
This interview with Adam Swick covers the fascinating world of Bitcoin mining and its connection to energy. Adam shares his background, his journey into the crypto industry, and how he became a part of Marathon Digital Holdings. Discover how Bitcoin mining is optimizing energy usage and helping to address supply and demand issues on the electrical grid. We also delve into Marathon's innovative immersion solutions for mining and their exciting joint venture in the UAE.
Transcripts are autogenerated. May contain typos.
hey everybody welcome back to the show like I said in the introduction I'm here with Adam swick of marathon digital Adam welcome to the show thanks for having me Ben thanks to the listeners for listening yeah I you know what's what's fun about this Adam is is we actually found out that we're we're relatively neighbors I uh you know it's when people think Bitcoin mining they think Texas and urot and and then you know we're we're up here in Minnesota sleepy little Minnesota um so yeah it's I'm I'm really glad that
we're going to get a chance to sit down and kind of hash out all things power and Bitcoin mining and Marathon yeah no definitely it's so true you know it seems like such a big space but on the other hand it's quite small uh and it's funny when you run into people and it was an absolute pleasure to have you reach out and realize that I think you're what 10 15 minutes away uh from each of our home offices so small world indeed and it's again crazy how frequently uh these serendipitous moments happen and so uh very pleased to
see that this podcast exists and very honored that I was uh invited to be on it oh yeah yeah I'm flattered by that that last part now of course I I was very excited to get you on the show so it's uh no this this will be good so where I like to always start with guest Adam is I I think it does really help the rest of the conversation to hear your background and and where you're coming from and then what in the world brought you to this crazy ecosystem of Bitcoin mining and marathon and so yeah if you could just
run us through your background and how that brought you to to Marathon sure and definitely one of my question favorite questions as well everybody has a crazy funny lucky you know weird story about what brought them to this world uh and so happy to share mine my background resume would be a little more boring uh you know exciting for me but might not be the most exciting for others started in Consulting learned a lot about how businesses operate how they could improve worked with lots of smart people spent some time in early stage Venture
Capital investing uh similar I I feel like across both those roles the main thing I learned was how to learn uh which I underappreciated what an important skill that was you know the ability to learn quickly and on topics that you had zero idea about whether it be a new consultant client you were walking into or a new startup that was coming in to pit you on this massive problem that you didn't even know existed uh it taught you a to be humble and recognize that you don't know as much as you think you know uh but B to
be open and learn fast uh so that's where it all started ended up then going back to school to get an MBA and came out of that really focused on crypto uh and found myself launching a small crypto hedge fund then found myself working at Kraken the digital asset exchange uh on their strategy team and their Finance team which was a super exciting time uh then actually left the world of crypto went back to early VC investing and realized that I just missed it uh you know once you're in this world it's it's very hard to leave
uh and so looked around a lot of places and was lucky enough to to find Marathon uh and I've been here about two years so that's the that's the resume background the the crypto story uh is actually when I was working in Consulting I had one of my good co-worker friends looking to leave and he was choosing between a couple of different jobs and one of those jobs he was choosing between was coinbase and so in order to serve as a sounding board for him as he made this next career decision you know I had to understand
what coinbase did uh and so I'm very thankful to this friend clearly because he's the one that uh sent me down the rabbit hole and I've kind of been learning ever since uh and this is what's brought me to today which is now as mentioned at Marathon digital Holdings what really drew me here was the team uh you know how smart how kind how driven they are and that's what's keeping me here today and the coming from the crypto side obviously the mining space has a lot of people that come from crypto and some that come from
energy definitely come from the crypto side and so I've been learning about the energy side and I thought crypto was the confusing complicated sector uh you know the energy side even even more so uh which again all goes to learning and it's all part of the fun so uh oh my go what brings us to today yeah well thank you Adam yeah and yeah yeah the the energy component to all this is a deep deep deep Rabbit Hole hence show I uh I I you know likewise like you I I I try to be as curious as I can be and it's like wow I gota I just I
got to talk to the the smarter people the people that are a lot smarter than me it's a it's a deep rabbit hole that's for sure yeah the more you know the more you realize you don't know and it's you know you know first starting to learn about Bitcoin I thought I understood it and you know would be explain it to friends as you first do when you're so excited and they would ask questions which I would not have the answer to and I realized I had to learn more uh finally thought I wrapped my head around
this distributed Ledger technology and then next thing I know you know buying a used Miner on eBay just to dabble with it and that thing showed up and I had no idea what to do with it and so again I felt like I was back to square zero on the learning curve when it came to mining uh in my apartment which my significant other was not a fan of having that thing humming away in the living room uh but uh again it's just learning after learning after learning and I think that's what keeps a lot of people in the space and what makes it
hard to leave the space is everything else seems slow compared to uh crypto and Mining in general yeah absolutely and I I mean especially the like that like you said kind of that transition from crypto to to bitcoin I I actually I'd be curious to hear like what maybe was the draw for you about the physical infrastructure the power like kind of the energy side just you know and I ask because it's it's quite a bit different than you know High return Prof file of a crypto portfolio that kind of thing so
I'd love to hear a little bit about that yeah sure and so to level set I think it's first that recognition Bitcoin is hard to understand I mean you have to have somebody that is willing to listen for a decent amount of time to truly appreciate how revolutionary it is and unfortunately 5 seconds is not enough and you have to have someone that's dedicated and and open to understanding uh and it's hard and people learn different ways and are drawn to different ways of thinking visual Learners Etc and this is just one of the things I
realized when I had the the crypto hedge fund is as I was explaining the idea of Bitcoin cryptocurrencies to investors in the space a lot of them didn't get it because they couldn't see it they couldn't feel it they couldn't wrap their head around it uh but I realized as I was walking them through the basics of Bitcoin when I mentioned mining they seem to get that more and you when you go to a a Bitcoin minor even when you have one of these as6 humming away in your living room like I had at one point
it's different you can see it you can feel it uh you know it's one for thing for me to say this is converting electrons into you know a store of value via Bitcoin but it's different to like see it there uh and I think it makes it real for a lot of people that learn it in that way whatever way that is uh and so I found it very helpful as a way to orange pill a lot of people is to really start with mining uh because I can show them pictures uh and I can show them videos and if I can kind of set that
hook with uh here's a physical thing and this is a part of this bigger thing of Bitcoin it's been a great way to start a lot of conversations those conversations obviously get very complicated as mentioned because here we are mining sits at that intersection of uh blockchain and energy which arguably are two of the most confusing spaces and we sit at the middle of them so you know uh it's perfectly reasonable why people don't completely understand what we're doing why Regulators wrestle with it but
also all the more important why it's up to us to take the time to kind of educate uh and at times oversimplify I think we fall victim to the curse of knowing too much you know you live in this world all day every day live it breathe it you start use acronyms and simplified things and throw around things like Jewels per terahash or megawatts this is these are not things that you knew 10 years ago uh before you got sucked into the space uh but it's all part of the fun and the challenge absolutely and yeah I think
you know I've I've started to experience a lot of that most recently again you know you're in the space for long enough and it just becomes no-brainers I think the the funniest one for me is you know now on I think especially Twitter and and some other you know spaces you see people throwing around 25 50 100 megawatt sites as if that's like the norm and it's like wait hold on we let's just pause here for a second yeah even a even a 25 megawatt operation that's a that's a serious operation yes
yeah no it's funny we have the exact same thing as we're obvious always speaking with Partners from around the world uh you know at times we will ask you know oh how big of a mining site are you have and they almost F sound embarrassed to admit to Big Marathon that you know they have a 10 megawatt site and you're like no that's that's that's a serious Bitcoin mine and and great for you that you've built something like that be because this is hard yeah absolutely and uh yeah I especially if you get out you know so
I'm I'm very privileged to my my day job I get a chance to go crawl around mining facilities I get to go poke around and and see these things in person and I just most recently was at a facility where their pilot program was a 15 megawatt operation inside of a decommissioned coal plant and I you you can't see the end of the shelving I mean this thing I it was just it's just so impressive when you get to see it in person and it's it's awesome that that you know companies are willing to to
offer up tours to just Everyday People people too so I yeah I'd encourage the audience if you guys haven't been into a Mining facility uh you should go check one out it's it's pretty incredible definitely it's it's almost too easy to put into words when you say things like oh you know marathon is driving towards this 23x target you're like okay that's a sentence I can wrap my head around it but then you start to ask the followup questions like okay how many machines that's just under 200,000
machines uh and you know 200 ,000 is exactly a number you can't visualize until you start going to these places and you know the logistics of keeping 200,000 things clean running operational keeping track of which ones need maintenance which ones need fixing the devil is in the details and so uh definitely a newfound appreciation every time I get to go to the sites uh because they are you know well oiled machines um themselves absolutely and I this is a good seg way because Adam I wanted to to to dig into
marathon and and you know chat about marathon and so one of the things that you know when you when you look at Marathon you guys are you know pretty natively an asset like company um you guys are really leaning on infrastructure Partners kind of throughout the stack there I would just be curious I mean is that what the future is going to look like for you guys are you guys exploring alternative basically what you know how do how do you see this playing out in the future yeah and you hit the nail on the head in terms of where we're coming from
we historically has focused on this asset light leaning on infrastructure partners and I do believe that that is the best way to grow fast you know any dollar that you're spending on infrastructure is a dollar you could have spent on another Asic another Bitcoin mining machine minor uh and so if the goal is to grow fast that's the way to do it and that's what we were really focused on over the past couple years and you know obviously there are then pros and cons to this model and so if you start to think
through all the key portions of you know working with a third party to host your machines or self-hosting there are things like you know who controls the operations you know obviously you might want to have your own way of doing things uh that that's a benefit ofing it yourself Opex can be slightly lower operating expenditures can be slightly lower if you do it yourself because obviously any thirdparty Hoster is going to be building in a margin for themselves sure you know one of the benefits of thirdparty Hosting is a
little easier to be geographically Diversified you know it's a lot easier to select amongst different providers hosters uh when oftentimes if you're doing it by yourself you might be all in on one location uh but you know some of the obvious pros and cons to answer your question what we're thinking about it moving forward is kind of like a portfolio approach to Mining and there're just as your own Investment Portfolio has stocks equities which are more volatile perform well in Bull markets perform less well in bare
markets you balance that out with your bonds uh and your fixed income you also have cash uh you might also have gold you know we can kind of think of and and what's the last one alternative assets you know like private Equity Venture Capital we can kind of think of examples for each of those in a Bitcoin mining portfolio and so I would argue that the thirdparty hosting is kind of like the stocks of our portfolio perform Super well in Bull markets performs westwell and bare markets self-hosting is kind of like the bonds
of the portfolio they're more stable uh more control over them Etc uh cash is basically obviously Bitcoin or gold would be the equivalent of Bitcoin which we hold on our balance sheet and the last piece is then those alternative Investments which is going to be things like renewable energy credits and so Marathon historically has been very overweight on you know the stock part of that portfolio the third party hosting and as we move forward I think you'll try you'll start to see us focus on it more as a portfolio and
there's a right time for each right piece to be put together um that's fantastic and what a what a awesome you know analogy to to draw to you know so I appreciate that a lot because I think it helps just lay out how you guys think about your your mining operation and then you know what we can start to to look for into the future um maybe just speaking to like the present day what you know if any do you guys have relationships with the power companies at the sites that you're you're at I I'd love to maybe just hear
like how involved in your infrastructure stack do you get just kind of in the present day yeah more and more every day and this is I think a good Trend that we're seeing in the industry I would say I think who coined it best was our friends over at orine which was the idea that mining kind of started as hobbyists I was one of them uh people tinkering around then we kind of entered phase two which was the Industrial mining era and so that was people building these massive multi hundred megawatt sites now you know orine calls it phase
three being like a responsible partner of the energy and financial ecosystem but the way that I simplify this is I think we're noticing a shift from being major customers of uh electrical generators utilities governments to being a instrument or a tool uh I have to think of a the right word uh to capture it but instead of us showing up and saying we would like to buy some cheap power please we're starting to notice a few of the more forward-looking utilities governments energy generators reaching out to us and
saying hey we've identified a problem and we think Bitcoin mining is the solution which means we're developing much stronger relationships with these energy generators energy investors governments uh as they're recognizing that there are ways to optimize their electrical everything um and so those relationships are all the more important uh educating is super important as we go along on this journey uh and different utilities are on different you know paths and it's really important to kind of meet them where they are understand
the work they've done understand the work that they haven't done and help take them to the next level wow yeah that's and I I mean I I'm starting to to see and hear quite a bit of that too um would just be curious are they approaching you guys with you know the the potential challenges on their grid system and are they starting to be more open-minded because and I asked that because you know previously couple years ago um they weren't so much or they were just flat out saying we don't want
Bitcoin mining on our grid system stuff like that so are they coming to you more open-minded and you know a little bit more open book is that what you're starting to see I think so they're it feels like they're more open to the conversation and they want to learn and I think the benefits of Bitcoin mining are becoming more and more welln in the kind of energy sector and word is spreading I like to say that you know Bitcoin miners are optimizers of energy and okay what is that word optimize it's
kind of meaningless but I I intentionally choose it because it is so Broad and so optimize what the economics of the site yeah Bitcoin miners can help with that uh how many energy how many wind solar developers are partnering with Bitcoin miners to optimize the economics of the site and have that Basel load customer that's sitting there to take the electrons reliably okay optimize what else optimize the actual performance of The Grid this is what's happening all the time in air Cott and and other countries around the world
where the grid just has a fundamental supply and demand problem and yes we can try to balance a scale by messing with the supply and turning plants on and off but Bitcoin mining is this new tool that allows you to mess with the demand very very quickly uh and so I mean between optimizing economics optimizing actual performance these these are the things that I think think are starting to perk the energy I hope are what is hoping to perk the ears up in the energy sector and cause people to reach out and I love
it when they reach out and say hey we have this problem we think you might be a solution could you help us think through it those are my favorite conversations to have which again are very different than four years ago which was us calling and saying hello we'd like to buy some power please it's just much more much more interesting conversations and I think going to lead to better answers for everyone involved absolutely yeah it's uh 100% it's going to lead to to a better working relationship kind of everything up and
down the the chain I uh you know interestingly I I recently recorded a a podcast with OT um so I had a couple representatives from the the large flexible load Task Force at urot um they shared some interesting perspectives and it it was actually a lot of undertone of concern turn over Ramp rates and just controllability of this load so what they found in OT is with UT being isolated is kind of this sweet little experiment you know it's isolated grid they can really and it's it's a large grid but it's small enough
where you know a couple percentage points of usage on that grid system is impactful so anyways they they shared with me that what they desperately are looking for in like a mining part or even you know more broadly they they actually didn't say mining a whole lot they called it large flexible load sounds right yeah they you know one of the things that they expressed was like the the creme Dela creme for them and that relationship is the controlability of the load and just being able to forecast it accurately I
curious are are you hearing things like that in these these types of discussions or is that started to come up yes yes it's it's all that it's a Bitcoin miners are getting better at what their capabilities are uh you know even things like overclocking and underclocking to oversimplify you know this world basically started as an onoff we're mining or we're not mining uh but as things you know Marathon we've developed our own firmware that allows us to overclock and underclock so suddenly that machine that one was
either zero or one running can now be you know 0.5 to 1.5 running yeah and so on the one hand you have Bitcoin miners getting a lot better at the tools they can offer and on the other side you have the energy companies that are getting better at articulating their problems and trying to figure out where those puzzle pieces come together uh and so yes we're seeing it and again I think education is a big piece I was speaking with someone the other day uh at a university that is a small micro grid and I was like oh have you ever thought
about uh balancing you know like with a couple Bitcoin miners to just help balance the micro grid he's like no not a big don't know much about Bitcoin monting not for me I was like oh that's surprising to me but nonetheless went on to ask him some more questions about the micro grid and he was mentioning how he was struggling with balancing uh and and I was like well you know to go back to my first question do you would some would a interruptible load that consume you know in the size of a shoe box consumes 3 kilow and you
can turn it on and off within seconds is is that appealing he's like well yeah I need that uh he was he was you know in his lab turning on and off water heaters uh to help balance the grid uh and so just boiling water uh and again shame on me I suppose for starting with have you ever considered Bitcoin mining as opposed to saying have you ever considered a you know interruptible load that can respond within seconds but again it was just that just different framing uh led to a very different level of excitement uh for the conversation
and I think all energy utilities are going through that uh in what actually is Bitcoin mining and once you kind of peek behind the curtain and pass some of the headlines that may be misleading uh it's it's very interesting yeah there's been some really sticky negative narratives out there uh regarding I think it's just Bitcoin at large and so you attach Bitcoin to the mining and they're they immediately just have a lot of negative association with that so oh wow what a cool what a cool story thank
you was that in Minnesota by chance is that like the U ofm or is that like a university local here I'll have to look up exactly where we we've been speaking with a lot of universities trying to push forward research in that and so uh uh it was in definitely in the midwest because that's the region that I focused on I selfishly was focused on ones that that I could hopefully visit uh uh but I'll get back to you cool yeah and we uh we should we should chat offline about maybe a u ofm initiative you know just
right here in our backyard I think that'd be cool to uh I I just I look at Texas and and the Texas blockchain council they're so in meshed with I think all the major universities down in Texas and I think maybe a little side thing we could potentially talk about is how do we get the U ofm involved if they're not already they may involved and I just haven't seen anything yeah I mean on the proon list we're definitely winning for a more hospitable uh environment uh weather-wise uh for these
Bitcoin miners so uh let's definitely make it happen I could I could use some during the as a somewhat new motan I could definitely use some of these Bitcoin miners heating up more things up here I've got a couple m30 s's in my basement Adam I'll I'll uh man you're ahead of me yeah there there's the INF floor heating right there there you go yeah if you don't mind the noise well no you know we'll we'll take a Steve Barber Black Box We'll Kill The Noise we'll channel the heat it'll be great it'll be
fun hey I enjoy sleeping to a little white noise so this all sounds good to me for those winter nights that's a it's a it's a it's a hell of a white noise like aund 100 deciel White Noise yeah no it's it's all good uh we're actually kind of going in a direction that I was curious about as well Marathon you guys have you have a hell of an R&D team um and you touched on it with like underclocking overclocking you've got Tech built up and around that I'd love for you to maybe just expand a little
bit more on what is your R&D team up to what are you guys what are you guys looking at yeah it's it's one of my favorite things about Marathon as well is just really trying to push the envelope in terms of what's possible and part of it is genuine excitement from everybody internally about wanting to try new things and that just being the general Spirit of entrepreneurship within marathon and part of it is forced in the sense of when you're mining with 200,000 miners you're running into
challenges that other people are not running into uh and at some point you're kind of like this is broken I need to fix it uh and so that's that's the backstory uh but yeah the things that we're focused on it all I think it really all started with our pool which is exciting that we run and operate our own pool uh Mara pool which a increases just control of things B increases transparency you know it is pretty cool to have a public company where you can you know in theory all of the analyst's
revenue forecast should be 100% accurate because you can know exactly when we're making any dollar watching those Bitcoins come into our wallet but it also allows us to try to make small enhancements and so you know to again greatly oversimplify think about things if you're running a public pool your pool has to support every machine out there uh whereas Marathon we basically our Fleet today is largely made up of two broad types of machines the kind of s19 series and XP series and so we don't have to support all those things which
again in theory might hopefully speed up the pool a little bit similar again to oversimplify you think about public pools can't really trust their Miners and so they have to do like an extra check anytime a minor is doing work and making sure that no one's trying to you know scam the pool you know we kind of We Trust our own Miners and so we can just remove those extra set of checks uh which these are these aren't 50% Improvement this is like you know 0 2% Improvement there 0.
2% Improvement there but over the course of you know 200,000 machines this starts to become very meaningful yeah uh so that's our pool which we're we're very excited by it then kind of led to Firmware and utilizing a propr prary firmware to manage all of these miners uh really look into overclocking really look into underclocking really look into shorter curtailment times and being able to turn on and off a lot quicker um and being able to optimize for your choice at that moment do you want to set a Target electricity draw a Target hash rate a
Target temperature a Target voltage um and we rely on this heavily and just got to the point where again we should do it ourselves uh and so that has then spun to many other things such as investing in other uh mining as6 which allow us to work collaboratively with what is the ideal Asic out there again the challenges that we've run into with 200,000 is different uh than yeah you know when I had one in my living room and so our wish list was just different uh so it's been great to collaborate with Asic manufacturers
along that line uh and then the last piece I would say of our the stack that we've been focused on is custombuilt immersion Solutions which really came to a the need there was with our joint venture in the UAE uh which air cooled was not an option uh and so you know very exciting opportunity to do the joint venture in the UAE I think our Ops Team almost fainted when we said that we were going to build a 250 megawatt m in the UA they you know said literally could you pick anywhere else uh in terms of the things
that our miners do not like are heat and dust and what if you were to find the most heat yes and you seem to have picked the place with the most heat and the most dust uh but it's actually it's actually been working super well uh and so just trying to think through you know fixes that noise problem that you and I uh to help you sleep better at night so you don't have to have as noisy of fans really uh reduces the amount of maintenance required on the miners uh again makes it much more flexible which
climate uh and this is this is all in its infancy you know Bitcoin mining is not that old Bitcoin mining at an Enterprise scale is even younger uh immersion Hydro is even younger uh so these Innovations are substantial uh these are big leaps we are not flattening the curve yet uh but you know heat reuse is another thing I could talk forever about all the cool things that that we have and uh hopefully more exciting news to come soon from both marathon and the entire industry as uh people are innovating oh absolutely and
well and so thank you for walking through the the tech stack there I mean it's you know couple couple things on that is I think as as companies like Marathon look to to Really continue I mean you guys really are you know people look at Marathon as as one of the leaders in the space so I think as you guys continue to to navigate that position in the market it's how do you have everything kind of inhouse so like you said that you can have that type of finite control over it and so I've got a a good buddy in the Twin Cities here as
well I give a shout out to Max yonke with urel poool I I know just how difficult getting a pool up and running is and I mean they've been crushing it they've been doing a really good job so it's like even just the the stuff on the pool side like man it's it's not easy so I mean kudos to to you guys and your team and then we I the form factor on hydro and and imersion and all that is I actually really like the the m53 is the whats miners I don't know a whole lot about bitmain's Hydro stuff but uh I've
been a little bit closer to to the new micro BT M50 53 series um super excited to see this like really nice tidy package closed loop system because single phase I curious to get your take but single phase seems to invite challenges you know whether it's keeping the environment clean or keeping your your you know all of your components working optimally I curious if how how that goes from immersion to hydro like what what do you guys see is yeah the better of the two no what I mean pros and cons to everything and
challenges with all of them it's kind of which battle do you want to fight uh you know in the in the UAE with the joint venture we went with immersion and so we've gotten really good at the immersion side of things were there challenges yes uh but did we learn and quickly overcome them yes uh and so hopefully we don't have to overcome them anymore more hopefully we've kind of overcome a lot of that learning that's what we've kind of seen you know the first container is the most difficult
two through 10 are a little challenging 10 through 20 and then you know you figure it out uh which was again all part of the fun and yeah in regards to miners it's an exciting time you know as we're recording this we're in this fun time period where we just heard a lot of announcements of miners coming uh but the minors are not yet in anyone's hands uh and so kind of an an exciting sit and weight period uh and very excited once those minors actually showing up in people's hands to start hearing the
evaluations the the pros the cons of all of these but again just evidence a lot have have you sorry to jump in have you gotten like have you have you touched and felt the s21s yet I don't know I personally I have not I know some of our team members uh I don't know if they've actually gotten into touch or feel it uh but you know I think the XP came out and everybody's you know ah man this our minds are blown Innovations never going to like continue after this and here we are uh again making another
big leap across manufacturers like you said uh microbt Canan uh ant minor orine uh all those that I am not rattling off apologies but uh The Innovation continues yeah it's it's uh it's a wild time for sure and we're uh we're recording end of September here um in 2023 and I don't we'll see how long you know people go or how far people go back on the podcast let the record show time stamp today's date yes Captain's Log yes um you've you've teased it a little bit a couple of times you guys have a 250
megawatt joint venture uh project going on with the UA Maybe how did that originate walk me through it I I guess if if you could sure and it kind of bring great question because it brings together a lot of what we've talked about is this was kudos to this this is an abudabi and so kudos to them and their utility and their uh Sovereign wealth fund over there for identifying the problem they have a electrical generation demand mismatch during the summer they can consume a lot of electricity running air conditioners but
on summer nights and for the not summer months the Electric electrical demand is much lower and so there's this major Gap clearly you have to build out generation to satisfy that Max Demand on the hottest day to run all the air conditioners yeah but that means a lot of it's sitting idle for most of the year uh this is exacerbated by the fact that a lot of their water is desalinated and so they actually have to keep a lot of these energy generation mechanisms running just to desalinate water and so you know just huge problem and again
kudos to them for identifying hey Bitcoin mining might fix this uh and so reached out had a conversation uh confirmed that yeah we think it could fix it too uh and then it happened very quickly started with a small pilot uh where again I we really stressed our Ops Team and saying let's try this uh we worked very closely to try to develop what we thought was a great immersion cooling container that could survive the elements out there deployed it during a hot month uh held our breath and watched for three months when this container ran
without any interventions needed no maintenance no anything it just hummed along for three months that's f and I think everybody looked around and was like yeah this this can work this will work uh and from there partnered with uh our friend 02 uh is the partner in the joint venture they own 80% we own 20% and we are building in the middle of deploying a 250 megawatt mine across two sites 150 megawatt site one 200 megawatt site in the Abu Dhabi region it's it's using the uh Emer and cooling it's using
obviously firmware is incredibly important over there uh to maintain temperatures um curtailment is incredibly important so you know as you mentioned end of September so we're coming out of hot summer months and so the machines are shutting down during those peaks of the day when everybody's running their air conditioners and then they're turning on at night and as we enter into winter they'll continue to run all all the time but it was this really great Partnership of working with the local utility ewick
ewe uh and then the Sovereign wealth Fund in terms of investment dollars 02 our operational partners and again everybody just got it uh and it's it's and it's going super well and I'm I'm hoping people are following along with this in other countries regions and other you know even small electrical utilities see this uh and see what's possible uh because again if you can do it with 250 megawatt in one of the harshest environments you know you can do this anywhere uh right and so it's
been a a lot of fun uh uh and some great work has been done across uh marathon and several of our partners to make this happen but uh hopefully we'll be continuing to deploy uh and targeted to be fully energized this year wow um it's insanely cool so I think maybe just to like boil it down even simpler the the solution that you guys are bringing to to to them is helping is it helping with the the the revenue like smoothing out the revenue to keep the utility running or I guess it's probably a combo platter
of like Solutions because you're balancing because I I don't think they run at 60 hertz over there but you got to keep the grid balanced which yeah you know you're right it's it's it's both number one it's you know like we said optimizing economics or optimizing the actual performance optimizing the performance they they wanted someone to help balance uh as they you know they have a lot of clean energy coming online they have a lot of nuclear uh and so having someone that can turn on and off which we're
doing and it was optimizing the economics if you have excess generation built out you know someone has to pay for that excess generation to just sit there doing nothing uh and instead we can you know help pay for that excess generation to sit there you know back the envelope numbers in 2021 I think the UAE produced 150ish uh terawatt hours of electricity but only consumed 129 what I'm basically saying is if you assume they could have let's pick an assumption number if you assume they could have taken all of
their excess electricity and monetized it at three cents a kilowatt hour that's $600 million obviously like there's a lot of assumptions in there you can't perfectly capture every spare electron but and that's at 3 cents a kilowatt hour like again Bitcoin mining is producing more than three cents a kilowatt hour uh but these are big big numbers if you're able to capture this difference between the uh production and consumption and optimize things man and I I mean that it's kind of like the Crux
of this whole podcast starting is like that type of Rel relationship that you guys are you know that you have established and that you are you know building and making more robust like that that is for me that's kind of the goal the dream is to help bridge that Gap and have those relationships form so it's that's so cool to to hear and again we geographically we live close to each other so Adam I I'll probably bug you for like a followup uh when you guys get farther along in that relationship just
to sure let's just dive deep into it at some point in the future yeah we'll bring along some pictures again it's like it's just legitimately uh cool stuff uh and I mean there are this is one example and there are examples across marathon and across the broader Bitcoin mining community of people just doing plain cool stuff yep yeah absolutely um maybe just to to keep a tab on the time Adam I you know we're we're kind of we we're we're bright and early we're not kind kind of we we we
started this podcast bright and early we both have busy days so what I'd love to maybe kind of end the show with your Adam is you Chief growth officer at at Marathon walk us through me and the audience through what the next two five 10 years looks like for for Marathon what what can you share with us yeah let's let's see I think it's uh let's call it focus on three things uh off the top of my head uh number one is continuing to focus on developing technology stack that is what unlocks a lot of uh value for shareholders and
unlocks a lot of performance enhancements that allow us to just mine more efficiently um so investing across software Hardware cooling Technologies I think you'll see us really focus on that uh the second is really continuing to focus on Partnerships uh and exactly what this podcast is focused on uh being an instrument to help governments utilities people building new wind or solar Farms people with stranded energy uh uh people with flaring issues PE uh landfills with uh methane leaking issues uh and helping to be an
instrument to those people uh yes we have to educate them that we exist but then again my favorite phone calls to get and you know hey we have this problem I think you can fix it let's let's work something out yeah uh and and that I hope is a big focus of our as moving forward and both of those are feed into the third which is just kind of maintaining our agility is obviously we have a having coming up uh we have a h a having is always coming up in this space uh and no one knows what's going to happen and so instead all you can
really do is preserve your optionality and the more you know if you have infinite options you'll be okay unfortunately infinite options are is hard to do uh and so instead we focus on our Tech we focus on our partnership we focus on driving near zero cost power we focus on having the most efficient machines in all these pieces together I think set us up to survive whatever Market we're headed into uh and those are kind of how all the the Pieces come together it's it's fun working in this space when you know come I've consulted
for other Industries where you could you could make the 10-e plan you could write it down you could say yeah this is what's going to happen over 10 years you know in this space arguably you can't make a 24-hour plan uh sometimes because you know you don't know what bitcoin price is going to be tomorrow Global hash rate who's going to announce a new Asic what the weather is going to be at one of your major mining sites right uh and I think you know Marathon recognizes that you know we plan for the 10 years
but we also recognize that the one thing we know is that that plan is wrong uh and therefore we have to have the tech in place have the Partnerships in place have the efficiencies uh in place to make sure that we are prepared for for anything uh to survive bad days and to really lean into and take advantage of the great days uh and so hopefully we're able to deliver on that I don't know check back in that two to five 10 year time frame yeah I love it I think you nailed it the industry is uh it's moving at warp speed
all the time so it's uh that that's fantastic thank you Adam it's uh it it's going to be fun to watch for sure um so maybe at the end here why don't you give you know give a handoff to the audience I don't know if if you want that to be for yourself personally or maybe Marathon at large you can point the audience to but uh give a hand off to the audience I want them to be able to get in touch with you guys if if they want sure I can give you the lay down on all of that and so our our website
easiest way to get there is mar.com m.com uh and then we're pretty active on Twitter as with most Bitcoin folks uh you can find Marathon uh Marathon DH short for Marathon digital holding so Marathon DH and you can find myself uh swick talk my last name swi Talk t k uh on Twitter uh and so look for us there reach out with any of any and all questions please let us know if you have a a problem where Bitcoin mining can be an instrument to solve it or know of anybody uh in your region where Bitcoin mining can be an
instrument to solve it because I think that where that's the future is heading awesome we will link to all of that in the show notes uh so that people can easily and quickly find you guys and Adam this was uh to say it was a blast as an understatement thank you very much for your time this was absolute awesome conversation and uh you take care yes thanks Ben so much thanks to all the listeners and hope every has a great rest of the day thanks bye all right uh Adam
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