Why Marathon Digital Stock Is Up More Than 60% This Week

Shares of cryptocurrency-mining company Marathon Digital (NASDAQ: MARA) are having a stellar week. As of 10:15 a.m. ET on Friday, Marathon stock is up a whopping 67% just this week. These outsize gains are partly attributable to a stabilizing cryptocurrency market and the rising price of Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC). However, Marathon Digital also secured an important piece of the puzzle for growing its mining business in the coming year.

On July 18, Marathon Digital announced that Applied Blockchain (NASDAQ: APLD), Compute North, and other companies would be supplying it with hosting capacity for 23.3 exahashes per second (EH/s) of Bitcoin mining. That's a mouthful, so let's break down why it's important.

Bitcoin mining companies like Marathon Digital supply computer power to the network and process transactions. The computing power is measured in what's called the hash rate. The current hash rate for the entire network is about 193 million terahashes per second (TH/s), or 193 EH/s, according to Blockchain.com.

Source Fool.com