Twin-Turbo Strategy: How MARA Grows its HODL by Mining & Buying Bitcoin

At Strategy World 2025, MARA CFO Salman Khan shares a simple but powerful metaphor: a bitcoin acquisition strategy should perform like a twin-turbocharged engine: fast, responsive, reliable, and built for changing conditions. His keynote outlines how MARA executes this model through two core strategies, mining and buying bitcoin, working in tandem to secure the network and accelerate treasury growth.

Turbo One: MARA’s Global Bitcoin Mining Engine

MARA has a nameplate capacity of 1.7 gigawatts of Bitcoin mining across four continents and 15 data centers, making it the largest publicly traded Bitcoin miner worldwide. This expansive footprint provides MARA with a critical advantage in scale and operational flexibility.

At the core of this strategy is a belief that ownership matters. By directly owning and operating more than 70% of its mining infrastructure, MARA achieves greater operational control and significantly lowers its cost to mine: in 2024, MARA saw its cost per petahash decrease by approximately 17% from the previous year. The principle of ownership extends across every layer of MARA’s business: from owning its mining pool, which maximizes autonomy and means no fees to external operators and retention of the full value of block rewards, to deploying proprietary two-phase immersion cooling technology that boosts power density and cuts maintenance and cooling costs. MARA’s conviction in vertical integration has extended to energy generation, with 139 megawatts of company-owned wind and gas-to-power assets fueling operations.

These combined investments in ownership have steadily lowered MARA's electricity cost per coin, enhancing its position within the industry. And as global hashrate rises and block subsidies continue to halve approximately every four years, we believe this level of efficiency will become a lasting competitive edge. As bitcoin appreciates, we expect MARA’s low electricity cost per coin will translate into stronger free cash flow and incremental EBITDA, directly enhancing shareholder value.

Turbo Two: Fueling Bitcoin Treasury Growth Through Capital Acquisition

Mining is only half of MARA’s story. The company is committed to using every available lever to strategically grow its bitcoin position. One of these levers is buying bitcoin in the open market. In 2024, MARA raised over $2 billion through convertible notes offerings and used the proceeds to purchase over 22,000 bitcoin, in addition to the 9,500 coins it mined that year. Today, MARA currently holds nearly 50,000 bitcoin, securing its position as the second largest publicly traded corporate bitcoin treasury in the world. To put that number in perspective: starting today, mining 50,000 bitcoin would take until 2036 assuming the miner maintains 5% of the network’s hashrate.

This dual approach (mining and buying) gives MARA agility in an ever-changing market. Rather than relying on a single channel of accumulation, we continuously assess market dynamics to determine whether it’s more efficient to mine bitcoin or acquire it in the open market. This “buy-or-mine” flexibility allows MARA to scale its holdings more effectively than either tactic could achieve alone.

Two Turbos Are Better Than One

Bitcoin has outperformed every major asset class in 11 of the past 14 years, often by an order of magnitude. Yet price cycles are challenging to predict, global hashrate continues to climb, and energy markets can move overnight. A single-speed strategy (only mining or only buying) leaves value on the table when any of these conditions shift. By contrast, the twin-turbo model lets MARA harvest whichever margin is wider: hash price, coin price, or both. The result is a more resilient treasury, a deeper moat, and a Bitcoin network that benefits from industrial-grade security regardless of market conditions.

The Bitcoin Playbook for Corporate Treasuries

Khan concludes with a thought experiment: if Apple, Amazon, or Microsoft had allocated just 1% of their cash into bitcoin three years ago, their internal rate of return would have ranged from roughly 30% to 90%, far surpassing the returns of conventional corporate treasury strategies. MARA achieved over $1 billion in fair market value gains on its bitcoin holdings in 2024 alone. For companies still parking surplus cash in low yield instruments, MARA’s twin-turbo roadmap offers a blueprint: a strategy with potential to turn balance sheets into powerful growth engines.

Watch the full keynote to see how both turbos drive MARA forward and stay up to date with the company’s latest performance metrics on our investor relations page.

About MARA  

MARA (NASDAQ:MARA) deploys digital energy technologies to advance the world's energy systems. We believe Bitcoin mining is the most scalable and adaptable digital energy technology today, optimizing how energy is produced, delivered, and consumed. As the industry leader, we monetize excess energy and balance the grid with flexible power demand. We build, own, and operate power infrastructure to expand access to electricity and develop technology that drives efficiency across high-performance computing applications.

For more information, visit www.mara.com, or follow us on:

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