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$MARA - Without HPC, they seem quite overvalued. Some quick stats. Enterprise (ex-BTC) valued at ~$4.4b. What do you get when you buy this? - Produced $51m in Q2. In Q2, hashprice was $51.15, hashcost was $38.19 ($41.20 if you include R&D and other). Hashprice is now $46 and on with diff adj may drop to $44. - At $51m EBITDA, EV/EBITDA stands at ~20x. This means even if BTC doubles every 4 years, and there is ZERO upwards adjustment to difficulty (which averages around 40% CAGR), and they cease diluting right now... they'd produce as much cash as you pay for the enterprise, in 20 years time. - 60 EH/s of ASICs. ~50 EH/s of them running on average. At 18.5 J/TH. 28 EH/s of them were bought and installed last year, costing ~$843m. (ROI will almost assuredly be negative. They paid $30/TH/s and are making ~$0.004/TH/s per day) - Let's assume 60 EH/s. That is currently ~750 BTC per month. That's currently a BTC Yield of about 1.4% per month. A year from now, that'd be 1.2% per month. Factoring in 40% CAGR on difficulty going up, it'd be more like 0.7% per month. - The above is going off of 370m fully diluted shares. It's assuredly higher than that, given they have $1.6b ATM left, and must be fully aware this currently valuation is a gift. - Stock based comp is fucking insane. The performance alone is embarrassing enough (sitting on an ivory tower blowing smoke up everyone's ass while ops/costs suck) ... but to get paid more in a day than the average American makes in a year, for mainly distributing shareholder's cash to bankers and ASIC manufacturers, would personally cause me existential dread. - $2.875b in debt that will not convert under $20/sh. (BTC might save them, here... but you'd better off owning BTC). Even if we pretended like the next halving would never occur, why pay $4.4b for this? If you apply a reasonable, but still stupidly high, EV/EBIDTA of 5x, that shreds ~$3.5b of value. Puts them at around $15/sh. Which I'd still not pay for, but you do you. --------- They've rallied ~30% since Sep 1, during which hashprice (their only revenue) dropped 15.56%. Ignoring the volatility of BTC, difficulty adjusted up by ~16%... meaning they will permanently mine 16% less BTC per day than they did on Sep 1, from now until forever. And that decay seems to show no signs of stopping. The only reasonable explanation for their rally is the market valuing their HPC/AI prospects. Which include: - Not having a CTO, as far as I can tell. - 2PIC is dead, as far as I can tell. So much for this (March '24: "We look forward to rolling out MARA 2PIC700 and setting a new standard for data centers with our next generation technologies.") At any rate, could happen. I'm sure they will at least announce some BS related to HPC/AI pretty soon. Will the market will forget that as recently as August (KeyBanc Forum) Fred has been throwing shade at HPC pivoters? "And they think, oh, I can convert something that was trading at, let’s just say, dollars 1,000,000 a megawatt into something that trades at 10,000,000 a megawatt overnight by just saying it could be an HPC spot. The truth is, of all the people that have pivoted, only really two have been able to announce deals." I recall some other talk that was, paraphrasing, "heh, $MARA is so strong that we can rely on our mining. Huge vertical stack. The other companies are probably jealous of us -- they'd love for us to share our technology!" Fred likes to talk about "inference at the edge"... but none of the curated pre-screened analysts (whose firms make money dumping $MARA shares) seem to have the balls to ask: WTF does this have to do with $MARA? They seem content with "wow, you sound smart." CAN YOU JUST FOR ONCE SAY WHAT THE FUCK $MARA IS GOING TO DO TO MAKE MONEY. (Note the distinction: $MARA, not management) We get it... you know how to SPEND money. --------- Lastly, a friendly reminder of MARA is not a treasury company. They made a PR post on linked in to make that clear. Banger music in the background. (linkedin.com/posts/maraholdi…) If you like BTC yourself go buy some, not the stock. Otherwise you are paying ~$4.2b for their actual operations that are optimistically worth like $1.2b or something. Yes, you're also getting their "datacenters" and contracted MWs. What do you think they are worth? Without Fred making a compelling case for anything (rather, he's insisted on throwing shade at HPC), I'd say they're worth the underlying operations of mining BTC. Oh, and a windfarm. You can mine BTC on some days! Anyway... $MARA will probably announce some HPC initiative soon, which will be bullshit just like every other thing the talk about. Good luck with that.

New Tesla Roadster Unveil 10.01

Every publicly traded (BTC) miner will be converting to HPC. Shareholders will demand the changeover, and I speculate boards will approve (nearly unanimously). This spurs a massive opportunity for the ever deal-hungry Private Equity industry as many miners opting to not covert will still need access to capital. DM me if you'd like to discuss further. My firm and I will be hosting a space on 10/23/25 at 5pm ET and would welcome 5 additional contributors to the discussion.

We created a pitch deck to tell a handful of VC firms about us and what we were up to (a fun experience!). Here’s a few slides about our background and some of the things we’ve worked on from the pitch deck (it was fun putting together the list of people in our teams who have gone on to found a whole range of exciting companies). We are delighted to have selected @radicalvcfund and @khoslaventures to lead our initial funding round, along with participation from @lightspeedvp, @kleinerperkins, Doerr Capital (@johndoerr), and Alphabet (@Google). We’ll be working with them to close our seed round over the next few weeks.