MARA Holdings, Inc. Q1 FY2025 Earnings Call

Good day, everyone, and welcome to MARA's Holdings Quarter 1 2025 Earnings Call. All lines have been muted for listening only. I am pleased to hand it over to your host, Robert Samuels, VP of Investor Relations. The floor is yours.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to MARA's first quarter 2025 earnings call. Thank you for joining us today. With me on today's call are our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Fred Thiel, and our Chief Financial Officer, Salman Khan. Today's call includes forward-looking statements, including those about our growth plans, liquidity and financial performance. These involve risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. We disclaim any obligation to update these statements, except as required by law. For more details, see the Risk Factors section of our latest 10-K and other SEC filings. We'll also reference non-GAAP financial measures like adjusted EBITDA and return on capital employed, which we believe are important indicators of MARA's operating performance because they exclude certain items that we do not believe directly reflect our core operations. Please see our earnings release for reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures. We hope you've had the chance to read our Shareholder Letter and look forward to your feedback. We'll begin with some prepared remarks from Fred and Salman; after their comments, we are going to be conducting an analyst interview with management. Today's session will be conducted by Stephen Glagola, an analyst at Jones Trading. With that out of the way, I'm going to turn the call over to Fred to kick things off. Fred?

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us. Despite a volatile start to the year, with global markets pulling back much of the momentum they gained ahead of President Trump's inauguration, Bitcoin has shown remarkable resilience. At MARA, we believe Bitcoin is increasingly positioned as a macro hedge, much like gold, offering protection in uncertain environments. Our stock tends to move with the overall mood of the market, especially when it comes to how investors feel about Bitcoin. In risk-off environments, our stock often trades down with the rest of the sector, even when our fundamentals remain solid. This correlation is largely tied to Bitcoin's price and broad sentiment towards miners. We believe the market is fully recognizing the strength of our core mining business, one of the largest in the sector. Meanwhile, some of our peers with smaller operations and little to no Bitcoin holdings are being assigned greater value, which doesn't reflect the full picture. Some of our competitors have publicly announced plans to limit mining growth or pivot towards hosting and AI GPU operations, while others are expanding by staying greatly attached, investing in new machines, making them less capital efficient. Meanwhile, we are focused on delivering long-term, low-cost energy solutions that outlast market cycles. We're doing this by transforming MARA into a vertically integrated digital energy and infrastructure company. This model gives us tighter operational control, improved cost-effectiveness, and strengthens our resilience against broader economic shifts. To achieve this transformation, we're focused on two key priorities: strategic growth with low-cost energy and efficient capital deployment and advancing research and development of digital energy technologies. In 2021, we predicted a paradigm shift in our industry where power producers and miners would converge to utilize excess energy, especially during periods of low demand, thereby stabilizing the grid and maximizing profits. We've now seen that vision begin to take hold, with the power industry acknowledging the benefits of Bitcoin mining as flexible load. To deliver on this vision, we are in discussions with governments and global energy corporations in the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, which could result in substantially lower energy costs and greater CapEx efficiency. Chasing exahash targets at grid-attached prices invites short-term thinking, and we're focused on long-term partnerships to achieve and maintain a low-cost energy strategy. In Q1, MARA delivered strong operational metrics. Our purchased energy cost per Bitcoin was $35,728. Our daily cost per petahash improved 25% year-over-year. At the start of this quarter, we completed construction at our fully-owned 200-megawatt data center in Ohio, with 100 megawatts now online and over 12,000 S21 Pro miners installed. In April, we fully energized 25 megawatts of gas to power operations in North Dakota and Texas, monetizing excess gas and mitigating methane emissions for the producers. We are now in the process of building out our 114-megawatt wind farm site in Texas, giving us behind-the-meter low-cost power to extend the life of legacy hardware that otherwise would have been retired. We plan to be fully operational at that site in the second half of this year. Through owning infrastructure, self-generating power, extending asset longevity, and managing costs, we are driving capital and operational proficiency across our business. Regarding our second key priority, MARA is investing in and developing digital energy technologies, which can both improve the efficiency of our operations and diversify our revenue streams. As many of you are aware, we're a founding investor in Auradine, a U.S.-based ASIC manufacturer whose chips are more power efficient than current market offerings. We have now begun manufacturing custom miners specific to MARA’s needs and applications, providing unique cost and performance advantages. Our hardware 2PIC, 2 phase immersion cooling, is now being deployed at two customer sites, one domestic and one international, with a 30-megawatt pilot underway. Preliminary data indicates that 2PIC is successful in enabling miners to increase operational hash rates with minimal losses in productivity—potentially reducing CapEx by up to one-third for a typical mining installation. Our software, MARA Pool, enables us to capture higher revenues and keep 100% of transaction fees, with block rewards outperforming the network average by over 10%. Looking ahead, we're positioning MARA's solutions to support AI inference workloads, which require modular low-latency infrastructure. We're already in advanced talks with several compute OEMs to roll out pilots this year. 2025 is an important year for MARA as we continue our transformation into a vertically integrated digital asset, digital energy, and infrastructure company, and we look forward to sharing more news as the year progresses. In conclusion, in Q1, we reduced costs, increased profitability, and proved we can design, build, and operate infrastructure powered by self-owned energy. Thank you for your support as we continue our transformation. We've come a long way, but this is only the beginning. Now let me turn the call over to Salman for some highlights from the quarter. Salman?

Thank you, Fred. Q1 was a challenging quarter as the average price of Bitcoin declined meaningfully compared to Q4, and greater network difficulty combined with rising global hash rate impacted our production. Despite these recent headwinds, over the past year, our energized hash rate increased 95% to 54.3 exahash per second in Q1 of 2025 from 27.8 exahash per second in Q1 of 2024. Also, we currently hold over 48,000 Bitcoin on our balance sheet. Since our full HODL announcement in July of last year, the price of Bitcoin has increased approximately 52%. At MARA's strategy of accumulating Bitcoin through mining and purchases, we expect it to create significant value for our shareholders over time. By mining Bitcoin at one of the lowest direct energy costs per coin in the sector, while also opportunistically acquiring Bitcoin, we can capture upside from both operational profitability and Bitcoin price appreciation. Now let me provide some financial highlights for the quarter. I would first like to point out that since the beginning of 2024, we have transformed MARA from 0% owned and operated capacity to approximately 70%. As a result, we made changes to how we present our financial results to give investors a clearer view of our business. The goal with these changes is to make our financials more transparent and better reflect the way our business is evolving. We also reclassified our prior period numbers to be consistent with the new format. These updates didn't affect our reported financial position, results, or cash flows. Revenues increased 30% to $213.9 million from $165.2 million in the first quarter of 2024. The average price of Bitcoin was 77% higher this quarter than the prior year period and contributed about $90.7 million to our revenues, which was partially offset by a decrease in Bitcoin production due to having an increased network difficulty. On the other hand, the Bitcoin price as of March 31, 2025, was 12% lower than as of December 31, 2024. This resulted in an unrealized fair market value loss of $510.2 million in Q1 of 2025. As a result, we reported a net loss of $533.4 million or negative $1.55 per diluted share in the quarter compared to a net income of $337.2 million or $1.26 per diluted share in the first quarter of last year. Importantly, since the end of the quarter, we've seen a substantial recovery in the price of Bitcoin. If that strength continues or even holds steady, we expect it to have a meaningful positive impact on our second quarter results. Despite recognizing a loss in Q1 due to a quarter-end Bitcoin price of roughly $82,000 per coin, the current approximately over $100,000 per coin price would imply a fair value gain of over $800 million thus far in Q2. Our adjusted EBITDA decreased to a loss of $483.6 million in Q1 2025 from $542.1 million in Q1 of 2024. Finally, our purchase energy cost per Bitcoin for owned mining sites was $35,728 per coin and $0.04 per kilowatt-hour. The cost of revenue per petahash per day, excluding depreciation, declined 10% sequentially despite the higher difficulty level to mine due to a higher global hash rate. Due to our shift from an asset-light to a vertically integrated strategy, we believe we are well-positioned to reduce our operating costs over time as we further expand our own initiatives. As Fred mentioned earlier, we now operate 139 megawatts of stranded or underutilized energy generation. Since the beginning of 2025, we have completed the acquisition of a 114-megawatt wind farm and fully energized our 25-megawatt on-site and edge compute operations at oil and natural gas fields in Texas and North Dakota. These low-cost projects are expected to further reduce our mining costs over time. With that, I'll turn it over to Stephen Glagola from Jones Trading to start our management interview. Stephen?

Thank you, Fred, Salman, and Rob for having me here today. I appreciate it. Fred, you opened your shareholder letter and prepared remarks opining on Bitcoin price action and how MARA's stock tends to trade more off-market sentiment versus fundamentals. Bitcoin is up around, I think, 9% year-to-date or so, hash price is down 4%, but MARA is down 15%. And so maybe can you just elaborate on where you see the market disconnect between your fundamentals and share performance and why you see Bitcoin price behaving less like a risk asset going forward?

Sorry, let's take that in two parts. So just relative to the share price performance, it's interesting. It seems that the market values us for our Bitcoin holdings but gives us no credit for our Bitcoin mining operations. If you were to look at how some of our peers who don't have a HODL are valued, they certainly have a market valuation for the Bitcoin mining operations. So we should, in theory, get the benefit of both, but that's just how the market happens to see us. We personally think that the company is obviously more valuable than that. As regards to the Bitcoin price action, many people I've seen in the news lately, there are now four or five new companies that have announced that they intend to become Bitcoin treasury companies. You've seen that the state of new ventures now approves their Bitcoin strategic reserve, and they will be investing in Bitcoin and buying it. The state of Arizona is going to allocate Bitcoin to the Bitcoin strategic reserve that they're creating, which is in the possession of state government law enforcement and others. I fully expect to see other states continue in this path of establishing strategic Bitcoin reserves. In the very near future here, we'll see the administration in Washington announce how much Bitcoin is going into the strategic reserve because I believe we're coming up on the deadline for that. I think we are starting to see continued good institutional inflows into the ETFs. We saw a number published earlier this week that showed about 9% of existing Bitcoin is now held by corporates and ETFs. As that continues to happen, that is going to drive the price of Bitcoin up. I believe we are in a very different market regime than previous regimes where we had cycles that every four years Bitcoin would act based on halvings and miner production. If you look at the market today, even though most miners are selling, MARA is still in a full HODL strategy. The price of Bitcoin is moving up, demonstrating that there's clearly demand in excess of supply. If you think of stock-to-flow ratios, 450 new Bitcoin are emitted today. If every miner were selling Bitcoin, that would be 400 Bitcoins entering the market every day, yet a greater number than that are being purchased each day by just a handful of players. I think we're going to continue to see things move up in Bitcoin longer term, which is why we are still in very much a full HODL position.

Thank you. And I'd like to focus, I guess, my lead questions here on your off-grid expansion strategy. So first, on the types of off-grid sites, MARA's prioritizing for future growth. Can you elaborate on the public-private partnerships with governments and energy companies that you're currently in discussions with? And are you focusing more on flare gas or wind or other sources for new acquisitions and developments? Thanks.

If you reflect on what I said four years ago at the Mining Disrupt Conference in July of 2021, I stated that Bitcoin miners are going to have to partner with energy companies or energy companies are going to own them. This is because I believe that eventually grid-attached Bitcoin mining, where you have a PPA and are paying an average cost, which I believe today the average PPA for a Bitcoin miner is somewhere north of $0.04 a kilowatt-hour, would not be tenable as we start getting out to the years of 2028 and 2032. You'll need to partner with energy companies and find a different way to structure the business. Without divulging details, we are already executing on that vision of partnering with energy companies. If you look at the Duke University study that was recently conducted, they published a statistic basically saying that while the AI industry needs over 40 gigawatts of power to deploy their growth plans, the U.S. energy grid has over 70 gigawatts available if the load is willing to be flexible by a small percentage, which currently the AI industry is not. We believe that by bringing solutions for load balancing to the AI industry, it will enable AI data centers to co-locate with Bitcoin miners, where Bitcoin miners provide the flexible load that enables AI data centers to operate as a flexible load on their grid. This will open up huge amounts of power to the AI industry. As we start shifting to inference or what is also referred to as agentic AI, these types of data centers don't need 500, 600, or 700 megawatts. They need less than 5. They need less than 50. These are much smaller data centers located in close proximity to the customers operating them, primarily private cloud operations, near-prime or on-prime. We believe that the future of energy is about partnering with energy companies, where we can help them monetize every stranded electron or every underutilized electron. If you look at markets like the Middle East, for example, we started working in the UAE in the winter; they had upwards of 3 gigawatts of excess power available, and in the summertime, that dropped fairly dramatically. However, since then, they have continued to add energy generation capacity. In Saudi Arabia, they likely have 4 to 5 gigawatts of excess energy capacity today that can be made available and monetized. In Europe, you have a similar situation. While people read the headlines about Spain and Portugal going offline due to grid instability issues, they have built out huge amounts of renewable energy, which has not been selling energy during a good portion of the year. Those are all electrons that are going underutilized. Our focus is to work together with energy companies, sovereigns, and government entities to take advantage of all those underutilized electrons by structuring business relationships that enable us to partner with them on a long-term basis to build, operate, and manage essentially flexible loads that can help monetize that stranded energy. As you look at the mix, what you'll find is a combination of thermal, wind, solar, and flare gas. It really depends on the market and the partner. We're in discussions with some of the largest energy companies in the world that have a mix of all those energy sources and nuclear power. Their concern is how they balance load on their grid, how they deploy flexible baseload, and how they monetize from behind the meter at renewable sites, the electrons they can't sell today. You'll continue to see a broad mix of energy-generating assets. In regards to flare gas, there are many gas assets around the world that can be applicable to this method. What you can expect is as we continue to work with especially oil and gas producers, you'll see more and more flare gas type generation come online in different parts of the world where we're able to deploy our Bitcoin mining operations to monetize that stranded gas. We are very excited about these opportunities. The message here is to expect us to grow aggressively in partnership with these public and private entities across the world. One of our stated goals was to grow our international business such that we had about a 50/50 mix between U.S. and international operations, and we will continue to do that. We believe this is a great way to grow U.S. tax rates, as even though we operate outside the U.S., it doesn't mean we won't be pointing that hash rate back to U.S. controlled pools. We are very excited about contributing to U.S. global mining share growth across all the countries where we are mining.

Thanks, Fred. Can you provide any insights on the timeline for when we might see those partnerships begin to develop? Will this start happening throughout 2025, or could you clarify the three-year target you're aiming for?

We purposely did not want to guide to exahash numbers because what that does is causes the market to look at us chasing a specific number and delivering on a certain time. When you're working with these large government and energy majors, things can take longer than one thinks. I think what I can say, though, is that you will see good progress this year and some announcements will give an indication of the potential of what's going to happen over the next few years. I think you'll see us showing up at events in places where other miners normally wouldn't be as we talk to these partners.

Thank you. Maybe this one for Salman or Fred, whoever wants to take it. MARA reported a hash cost of 0.0285 per terahash in Q1, and that's I think it marks four consecutive quarters of sequential improvement. As you continue to expand this off-grid power capacity, how do you expect this to impact your hash cost position over the next 3 years?

Salman, do you want to take that?

Yes, so Stephen, as you mentioned, we have sequentially reduced our hash cost, and our eyes have been fixated on capital and operational efficiencies. That result is showing up in our historical P&L. As we have stated in the past, we expect our hash cost to continue to decline over time. Those are as a result of actionable projects that we have worked on, some of those that you have seen publicly announced and others, as Fred mentioned, are in the pipeline. As we move forward from here, we expect Bitcoin mining to be—this sector, every four years, there's a halving event that occurs. The expectation is that the Bitcoin price is going to go up. We are building our company in a position where we don't have to rely on the Bitcoin price or hash price to continue to increase. We expect it to go up, and we expect it to create significant value for us, but we are prepared for the downside situation. It’s very important for us to be sourcing megawatts that are closer to the low-cost environment. For example, the two announcements that we had in Q1—the 139 megawatts generation of electricity from our own source—one of those is the wind farm in Texas, and that results in a significant reduction in our cost because we consume electricity during the times when the wind blows, and the grid is congested. The grid loves that because we are able to decongest the grid while hashing at the peak hours, and we don’t have to mine when the electricity is expensive. So that’s the kind of model that helps us drive our costs down. One point I want to mention is that while the sector is focused on specific KPIs, some companies, some of our peers are very focused on joules per terahash. Some of them are very focused on uptime. No doubt that these are important metrics, but you have to view what that value does to create for your stockholders. Our focus is on value creation for our stockholders. The uptime could be compromised for that; the joules per terahash could be lower depending on the pricing where you get there, as long as it creates the most value for our stockholders; and that’s precisely what our eyes are focused on, and that’s exactly what we believe is going to drive our hash cost further down from here.

Great. Thank you. You can think of it as when you have your own generation and your energy price is substantially lower than $0.03 or $0.02 a kilowatt-hour; then all of a sudden, it opens up the ability to use perhaps slightly less efficient machines as some offset. If we're able to deprecate machines that have already been fully depreciated from our grid-attached sites and reuse those behind the miners at these intermittent sites, your hash cost drops very significantly. If you don't have the need to operate 99% of uptime because the machines are depreciated, well, they have already been paid for. Every kilowatt hour you can operate, especially at these low power costs, is a profitable hour. Over time, as we continue to grow this fleet of what we call our AARP fleet, our advanced ASIC replacement fleet or retirement fleet, that will have a very positive impact on the overall hash cost going forward. This also gives us a secondary advantage, which is if you're only doing grid-attached like some of our peers do, every 3 or 4 years, you have to replace your fleet to stay competitive because you're paying a fixed price PPA, and potentially even at energy costs going up due to demand on the grid. When you sell off those machines and buy new ones, by being able to retire our machines into a graceful program of retirement at these behind-the-meter sites, our hash rate hasn't decreased in the same way that our peers have seen, where they're having to do net-zero replacements. We're maintaining a certain amount of hash rate and adding it incrementally. It also gives us the ability to buy other people's retired machines. If you can purchase a machine that is only one-third less efficient than a state-of-the-art machine, but you're only going to pay one-third of the price, that’s actually very beneficial. We believe this is the right strategy going forward as we continue to scale.

Thank you. Can you address the concerns that lower hash cost for off-grid mining may be offset by trade-offs like reduced rig uptime, higher operational expenses, and elevated capital expenditures? Maybe how do you see the IRR for off-grid Bitcoin mining sites compared to grid-connected sites? I know you touched on some of the economics of the wind farm in the shareholder letter, so maybe just elaborating on that.

Yes. If you look at the wind farm, for example, the infrastructure cost as stated in the shareholder letter is about $150,000 to $160,000 per megawatt, which is substantially less than what you'd pay in a traditional grid-attached setting because we're able to use these so-called retired infrastructure—meaning miners and containers, etc. When you marry that with a wind farm, you don't have an input cost for your energy. Your energy cost, marginally to put a number to it, is about $0.01 per kilowatt-hour for your O&M. That essentially gives you best-in-class operating costs when looking at the minimal infrastructure and power costs. So if you can operate 60% of the time, that's a great opportunity right there. If you can operate 70% of the time, it’s outstanding. Some of these wind assets have fairly good uptime that allows for that. In the case of flare gas, you're operating 24/7 at a very low cost. Those types of sites are, again, very profitable. As you get into public-private partnerships, you can operate intermittently, especially if the price of energy that you're paying is similar to that of a wind farm or flare gas site. The concept of Bitcoin evolving from being a 99% uptime operation to becoming more of an intermittent operation that shapes load to meet demands of energy companies requires that you have systems in place to shape your load to their supply. That's been a significant focus for our technology team over the past year.

Just to add to that, the ARP program that we talked about earlier—the IRRs for those are significantly higher than a traditional model. Even with the depressed hash price assumption, we expect the IRR to be in the range of 30% to 40%. This is during the year when we have a depressed price environment for hash prices, so it's a very conservative outlook. When considering the cost per coin or energy cost, as Fred mentioned, electricity costs about $40 per megawatt-hour—all-in cost probably around $50, $55 per megawatt-hour for traditional Bitcoin mining today. For the ARP program, we expect operating costs to be about $10 per megawatt-hour. As you can see, we are systematically moving towards operations that are closer to lower costs, which will continue to drive our costs down from here as discussed previously.

Thanks, Salman. I want to turn to AI real quick and the 2PIC. Can you maybe share more early market feedback from your 30-megawatt 2PIC immersion pilot project and what’s happening there? What specific revenue opportunities do you see emerging from commercial deployments of 2PIC and AI data centers?

Sure. The 2PIC deployments we've done so far have been with Bitcoin mining operations, which is the ideal way to test the system for any bugs, if you would. What we're finding there is that we have the ability to substantially overclock systems. If you think of it this way, if you need 100 miners operating at nameplate capacity to run a site, and you can overclock them by 50%, it means you could cut down the number of miners you actually need to buy by a third. Given that miners are one of the most expensive components in a deployment, that CapEx savings is substantial; the savings significantly outweighs any marginal increase in the cost of the 2-phase immersion system. In AI, it’s even more critical because of the ability to overclock your GPUs. As AI moves to 1-kilowatt chips, you will need to transition to new cooling technology. We are specifically designing 2-phase liquid cold plate technology, which is a plug-in replacement for existing solutions today. That will have a cooling technology that helps people deploying AI transition from rack mount systems over time to 2-phase liquid immersion technology, but they'll be able to begin using our liquid cold plate solutions now to lower their cooling costs. We don't use water in our systems. We are also environmentally friendlier in those spaces. We fully expect to see some exciting opportunities there. We're currently deploying and preparing to deploy pilots with multiple compute OEMs on the AI side, testing solutions across a broad set of applications and configurations, enabling us to characterize the benefits for each of these OEMs. In the AI market, we believe that partnering with compute OEMs will reduce sales friction and dramatically increase potential demand for our products. 2PIC is just one of the many solutions we plan to bring to the AI and digital infrastructure market. Over time, we intend to deploy a broader range of solutions and services so they can leverage our capabilities in power management, orchestration, and other areas. We are very excited about what this market opportunity will bring and believe 2PIC and our liquid cold-plate solutions serve as a great market entry vehicle for us, especially as the AI technology industry continues to develop and advance into hotter processors.

Thanks, Fred. One final touchpoint I want to discuss is the Auradine Series C funding round. I was wondering if you can disclose your ownership stake there and if you're interested in pursuing a majority position or potential vertical integration in the future?

As it relates to Auradine, we own a little under 15% of the company today. One key reason we were heavily involved in founding the company was the high cost of developing semiconductors. We felt it would be best accomplished by leveraging institutional investment dollars. Today, the investors in Auradine include Mayfield, Celesta, Samsung, and many others. One of the Board members on that company, who serves alongside me on Auradine's Board, is Lip-Bu, the CEO of Intel. Auradine is focused on solutions outside of Bitcoin mining as well. The Bitcoin mining chip—of which we are the predominant customer—is highly power efficient and features a set of traits allowing us to manage energy efficiency effectively to meet targets like hash rate and maximum Bitcoin production. Auradine is also developing AI infrastructure technology around networking that we are very excited about. They have already spun off an AI security technology business, and if they continue their successful trajectory, it will be a very valuable investment for MARA. However, it’s not something we aim to make captive anytime soon. Regarding tariffs imposed by the Trump administration impacting mining rig procurement, as mentioned in the shareholder letter, we've begun manufacturing our own miners now. We've been developing a supply chain around this, allowing us to optimize and remain agile. We're focused on minimizing the impact of tariffs as much as we can. When you think of a miner, the majority of the cost comes from the ASICs. Our relationship with Auradine keeps our costs low and controls the supply chain, ensuring our own supply while minimizing tariff impacts. In terms of infrastructure, steel, metals, and components used in containerized solutions are affected by tariffs like anybody else. However, we do have a strong supply chain team. Especially with 2PIC and our solutions around containerization and infrastructure, we'll continue optimizing based on evolving tariffs. Personally, I believe we'll see trade deals announced continually over the coming months that will ease many concerns for industries, although tariffs related to China will likely remain a challenge. Sourcing outside of China will intrinsically improve circumstances. Lastly, as our business grows internationally, the tariff picture changes significantly when you buy miners or infrastructure to be delivered somewhere outside the U.S.

Thanks, Fred. In March, MARA established a new $2 billion at-the-market equity facility. I hope you can discuss the rationale behind choosing an ATM program over additional leverage and outline your priorities for deploying these funds in '25 and beyond.

Sure. When thinking about the sources of capital for MARA in general, it's been predominantly dependent over the years on certain converts. As you recall, we've done some converts in 2021 when we put some leverage on the balance sheet and bought Bitcoin. We also executed a 0% coupon last year to buy Bitcoin as you remember from the Q3, Q4 timeframe. Our usage last year for the ATM was less than 50% of our total source of capital due to that. Considering our capital profile, with our growth plans, we assess the best sources of cash and capital and responsibly look for opportunities for raising funds. We are not in the market every day; we opportunistically create KPI-driven capital raise programs, which have served us well in recent years. When considering raising capital, it has to be allocated to accretive projects. Our established threshold is high regarding how we allocate capital and what rates of return we expect. As discussed earlier, the projects in the future are expected to squeeze more value from the same investments we've made previously. Additionally, we focus on return on capital employed. While it can fluctuate quarter-over-quarter depending on Bitcoin prices, on a long-term view, it remains one of the healthiest in the sector. We take pride in maintaining prudent balance sheet management to preserve our flexibility regarding available capital sources.

Thanks, Salman. I appreciate it. You have that full HODL approach within your Bitcoin treasury policy adopted in July of '24. We've seen other miners in the market starting to liquidate Bitcoin that’s mined and more. Do you plan to maintain the strategy through '25 and beyond, and what factors or market dynamics might prompt MARA to reconsider or sell some of its monthly production?

Yes. When considering MARA, the distinguishing feature is that investors have opportunities to invest in either Bitcoin HODL or in companies like us that are pure-play miners. For instance, our cost per coin is one of the lowest in the sector. Any upside from the cost per coin to the Bitcoin price benefits our stockholders as the gold price kicks in. MARA is utilizing a twin turbocharged strategy, as you might acknowledge; if you're a car owner, you understand the difference between a base model and one with a twin turbo engine. The latter highlights the benefits of such a portfolio approach, which is highly attractive for long-term investors. The HODL strategy we adopted last year came as we assessed market conditions, political patterns, and macroeconomic factors. It made sense for us to HODL and accumulate Bitcoin that we haven't sold. We also bought Bitcoin by leveraging converts, as this was the best use of our capital at that time. While we are primarily a Bitcoin miner, our stockholders benefit from us holding the second-largest Bitcoin treasury worldwide with over 48,000 coins today.

Thank you guys, very much. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Steve.

Thanks, Steve. We appreciate the questions. We’re going to pass on taking retail questions today, as most of them were already addressed in today's call. Thanks, everyone, again, for joining us. If you have questions that were not answered during today’s call, please feel free to contact our Investor Relations team at ir@mara.com. Thank you very much, and enjoy the rest of the day.

Thank you. This does conclude today's conference. We thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day.