Crypto miner Iren surpasses MARA in both Bitcoin production and fleet utilization in July

Iren Limited (ticker IREN) is now the leading mining company by hashrate, according to an announcement on Wednesday. The firm, based in Sydney, surpassed rival MARA in both production and fleet utilization.

According to an announcement, Iren produced 728 BTC in July, as compared to MARA’s 703 BTC. Iren utilized over 90% of its fleet.

Notably, Bitcoin's hashrate climbed above 900 EH/s for the first time last month. The network’s hashrate is the total computational power used by miners to process transactions and secure the Bitcoin blockchain by expending energy.

Iren notched an average hashrate of 45.4 EH/s, representing revenue per Bitcoin mined at $114,891. MARA saw a realized hashrate of 43.94 EH/s, with just under 75% of its fleet in operation.

"We delivered another month of record revenue of $86m and record hardware profits of $66m in July, supported by strong Bitcoin mining economics and continued demand for our AI Cloud services," said Daniel Roberts, co-founder and co-CEO.

The company also recorded $2.3 million in revenue from its growing compute business. MARA, unlike many crypto miners that have begun pivoting towards high-performance computing services, has remained a pure play bitcoin miner. In June, MARA mined 950 BTC, its highest amount since the 2024 Bitcoin halving.

IREN is trading at $18.32 at press time, up over 11% on the day, according to The Block's price page. MARA is up nearly 2% to trade at $15.91.

Bitcoin treasuries

MARA is also the second-largest corporate holder of bitcoin. The company’s holdings climbed to 50,639 BTC, worth over $5.8 billion.

In related news, CleanSpark (ticker CLSK) said it grew its treasury to over 12,700 self-mined bitcoin.

"Importantly, we continued to self-fund our operations through strategic Bitcoin sales, enabling ongoing accumulation while avoiding any use of equity financing or shareholder dilution," CleanSpark CEO Zach Bradford said in a statement, seemingly commenting on the growing trend of so-called digital asset treasury companies raising capital through equity and debt sales.

Cipher Mining (ticker CIFR) said it mined 214 BTC, sold 52 BTC, and bumped its holdings to 1,219 BTC in July.