Bitcoin Miner MARA Clears Its BTC-Backed Debt and Approves $500 Million Buyback After Q3 Profit

MARA Holdings‘ board authorized a buyback of up to $500 million of its common stock on Nov. 9, the day the bitcoin miner disclosed in its quarterly report that it had raised about $1.1 billion by selling 13,597 bitcoin after Sept. 30 and had repaid all of its bitcoin-collateralized loans.

MARA had raised $750 million in loans to pay for Long Ridge, a natural gas power plant in Ohio, in a deal that has not yet closed. Of the $750 million in collateralized loans, $600 million was new borrowing and $150 million refinanced an existing Coinbase credit line, leaving the company with about $350 million from the bitcoin sale by our calculations. At Sept. 30, MARA held $946.5 million in cash and cash equivalents plus $12 million in restricted cash, for a total of $958.5 million, according to its quarterly report.

MARA said it intends to keep “using bitcoin to build cash for purposes such as AI infrastructure opportunities, to satisfy the puts on our convertible notes that become exercisable next year, and potential share repurchases.” Convertible notes are bonds that can be swapped for shares, and the puts give their holders the right to make MARA buy them back early.

MARA put the average sale price of the bitcoin it sold after the quarter ended at about $81,039 a coin in its shareholder letter. By Unchained’s calculation, that was roughly 3% below the $83,556 per bitcoin the company used to value its holdings at Sept. 30.

Earlier this year, MARA sold 15,133 bitcoin to retire about $1 billion of convertible notes. From the start of 2026 through Sept. 30, before the $750 million repayment, MARA cut its total debt by $1.4 billion, or 37%, the company said.

Get Unchained’s crypto news in your inbox with the free Unchained Daily newsletter.

MARA reported net income of $632.1 million for the third quarter, up from $123.1 million in the third quarter of 2025. After a loss assigned to minority shareholders in its subsidiaries, income attributable to common stockholders was $634.4 million. The result rested on an $885.3 million unrealized gain in the value of its digital assets during the quarter, nearly all of it on bitcoin. MARA had posted net losses in each of the three quarters before this one. For the first nine months of 2026, it still shows a net loss of $1.24 billion, compared with net income of $397.9 million in the first nine months of 2025.

Third-quarter revenue fell 35% to $164.2 million, down from $252.4 million in the third quarter of 2025. The main cause was a lower bitcoin price. Bitcoin mined in the quarter was worth an average of 37% less than a year earlier, which alone took $94.8 million off revenue. An $11.7 million benefit from higher bitcoin production offset part of that: MARA mined 2,247 BTC in the quarter, up from 2,144 BTC a year earlier. Put together, those effects left mining revenue $83.1 million lower, which is most of the $88.2 million total drop.

MARA wrote in its shareholder letter that it is targeting two data center leases for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) tenants before year-end, but added that “market conditions are fluid and that timing could slip into next year.”

On Nov. 4, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved the Long Ridge acquisition. MARA expects the deal to close in the coming weeks, subject to remaining conditions. The plant is currently authorized to sell 485 megawatts of power, according to the letter.

Related Listen: Why Soaring Bitcoin Mining Stocks May Signal a Bigger Shift to AI

{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@id":"https:\/\/unchainedcrypto.com\/bitcoin-miner-mara-clears-its-btc-backed-debt-and-approves-500-million-buyback-after-q3-profit\/#arve-youtube-pifr-x5eefa","@type":"VideoObject","embedUrl":"https:\/\/www.youtube-nocookie.com\/embed\/PiFR-x5EefA?feature=oembed&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&autohide=1&playsinline=1&autoplay=0","name":"Why Soaring Bitcoin Mining Stocks May Signal a Bigger Shift to AI","description":"Many major miners are being valued like AI infrastructure companies. That shift could reshape U.S. mining, and isn’t easily reversible.","thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/unchainedcrypto.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/thumb1.png","uploadDate":"2025-10-29T14:20:42+00:00"}

The post Bitcoin Miner MARA Clears Its BTC-Backed Debt and Approves $500 Million Buyback After Q3 Profit appeared first on Unchained.