IREN Limited beats MARA Holdings in both production and fleet efficiency, becoming the top mining company by hashrate. Per its Wednesday announcement, the company mined 728 BTC, edging out MARA’s 703 BTC, despite deploying only 50 EH/s—less than MARA’s 58.9 EH/s. IREN also used more than 90% of its fleet. Its stock climbed over 11% intraday, changing hands at $18.32, notably ahead of the 1% to 5% increases seen by most rival Bitcoin mining firms. IREN pulled in $114,891 per Bitcoin Despite the recent spike in mining difficulty , which has pushed up energy demands and narrowed margins, IREN still pulled in revenue from Bitcoin mining. For the month of July, the company maintained a 45.4 EH/s average and earned $114,891 per BTC, while MARA trailed slightly at 43.94 EH/s, operating with less than 75% fleet utilization. Daniel Roberts, IREN’s co-founder and co-CEO, even commented on their earnings, “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.” The company also raked in $2.3 million in earnings from its computing operations. In early July, IREN had bought 2,400 of the Nvidia Blackwell GPUs to accelerate the expansion of its AI Cloud Services. Overall, the company’s market cap spiked to $4.11 billion, securing its position as the second-largest public Bitcoin miner by market cap, after overtaking Riot Platforms and Core Scientific. Only MARA remains ahead. Meanwhile, MARA’s July performance dipped compared to June, when it mined 950 BTC—its highest output since the 2024 Bitcoin halving. June’s output contributed to a robust Q2 that saw revenue rise 64% YoY to $238 million. Currently, the company holds 50,639 BTC, making it the world’s second-largest corporate holder after MicroStrategy. Its stock is also up 2%, trading at $15.91. Other companies like CleanSpark have also continued to boost their treasury. Now it has over 12,700 self-mined Bitcoin. CleanSpark CEO Zach Bradford remarked, “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.” Cipher Mining also reported it mined 214 BTC in July, sold 52 BTC, and increased its total holdings to 1,219 BTC. Culper Research had called out IREN on its AI projects Previously, Culper Research labeled IREN “wildly overvalued, “arguing that though the company flaunted its AI ambitions, its project was underfunded. He compared IREN’s AI strategy to entering the Monaco Grand Prix, only in a Toyota Prius. After these calais, IREN saw a steep drop from $12.31 to $5.59 in April, before rebounding sharply, climbing more than 227% to $18.32 over the last four months. IREN is connected to 2,910 MW of grid power and supports a vertically integrated model capable of delivering everything from powered shells and tailored infrastructure to full-service colocation and cloud hosting. Besides, CEO Roberts emphasized that they are focused on running both Bitcoin miners and their GPUs in parallel to build their infrastructure and ability to capitalize on evolving market demand. The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them .
