This week, the publicly traded mining company Marathon Digital Holdings unveiled new firmware and a control board designed to enhance the efficiency of bitcoin mining rigs. Marathon revealed it has been developing this technology for about a year.
Marathon Releases Custom Firmware and MARA UCB 2100 Control Board
On March 25, 2024, Marathon (Nasdaq: MARA) announced that it was launching new firmware called MARAFW and a control board dubbed the MARA UCB 2100. MARAFW is custom firmware designed to optimize chip settings in bitcoin application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) mining rigs. Optimizations include increasing hashrate, auto-tuning and the manual customization of settings.
“[The firmware] provides options for overclocking to assist in boosting bitcoin production or underclocking for improved efficiency,” Marathon’s announcement detailed. “Additionally, MARAFW includes intelligent thermal protection to defend miners against overheating, thereby protecting their longevity. MARAFW is compatible with the majority of stock control boards, as well as Marathon’s MARA UCB 2100,” the company added.
MARA UCB 2100, a proprietary control board crafted internally by Marathon, comes pre-equipped with Marathon’s firmware – MARAFW. This control board facilitates support for a wide range of bitcoin mining rigs and claims to ensure compatibility with numerous mining pools. “One of Marathon’s key differentiators is its vertical tech stack, and for the first time, we are providing the broader mining community with an opportunity to experience some of the proprietary technologies that set Marathon apart,” Fred Thiel, Marathon’s chairman and CEO stated.
Marathon isn’t pioneering the concept of bespoke firmware; several entities have already engineered solutions to enhance the efficiency of mining apparatus. For instance, Braiins has introduced its own tailored firmware, Braiins OS+, which enables individual chip tuning to optimize both the hashrate and power efficiency of bitcoin ASIC units. The company claims that Braiins OS+ empowers miners to refine their ASIC miners’ performance, boost efficiency, and mine across various pools, all while slashing data transmission between the mining farm and the pool by 95%.
Marathon is confident that its latest offerings will achieve similar successes and is presently deploying MARAFW across its extensive fleet of over 200,000 bitcoin mining rigs. Following the favorable outcomes from these preliminary deployments, Marathon disclosed that it is making both MARAFW and MARA UCB 2100 available to the wider bitcoin mining industry. Moreover, Marathon has revealed that it has already completed sales of MARAFW and MARA UCB2100 to various enterprise customers.
“With MARAFW and MARA UCB 2100, we have developed a unique set of complimentary products that we believe can help miners better navigate the upcoming halving and beyond. We invite all parties who are interested in mining like Marathon to contact us and test some of the unique technologies that we are developing to improve profitability, efficiency, and stability,” Thiel stated in his closing remarks of the announcement.
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