Marathon Digital (NASDAQ: MARA) filed its quarterly report for the period ended March 31, 2026 with the SEC on May 11, 2026, and buried in the revenue-recognition language is the single most important thing to understand about any bitcoin miner: how the revenue is actually counted. Cost-per-coin headlines are downstream of this. Before you can argue about whether a miner is profitable, you have to know what the top line even represents — and MARA's 10-Q spells it out.

Per the filing, mining revenue is recognized using a formula tied to the company's contribution to its mining pool. Marathon provides hash calculations to a pool operator, and its revenue is a function of those calculations expressed as a share of the broader network. The filing describes "the daily hash calculations that the Company provided to the pool operator as a percent of the Bitcoin network's implied hash calculations as determined by the network difficulty, multiplied by the total." In plain terms: you earn in proportion to how much of the network's work you did, and the network's difficulty sets the denominator.

the following formula: the daily hash calculations that the Company provided to the pool operator as a percent of the Bitcoin network’s implied hash

This is the mechanism that makes mining a relentlessly competitive, difficulty-driven business. Network difficulty rises as more hash power comes online, which means a fixed amount of a miner's own hashing buys a smaller slice of the same block rewards over time. Marathon's disclosed formula captures that directly: its revenue is its hash as a percentage of the network's implied hash. Hold MARA's machines constant while the network grows, and the percentage — and the revenue — shrinks. That is the treadmill every miner runs on, and the 10-Q states it as accounting policy rather than commentary.

For the Cost Per Coin series, this matters because the cost side only makes sense against a clearly defined revenue side. A miner's all-in economics are the energy and infrastructure spent to produce the hash calculations, divided by the bitcoin those calculations earn under the pool formula. If you don't anchor on how the revenue is recognized — pool contribution scaled by difficulty — any cost-per-coin number floats free of its basis. Marathon's filing gives the basis explicitly: revenue is a difficulty-adjusted share of network output, recognized through the pool operator.

The pool structure itself is worth dwelling on. By contributing hash to a pool, Marathon trades the lottery-like variance of solo mining for a smoother, proportional stream — its revenue tracks its steady share of network work rather than the lumpy timing of finding blocks alone. The 10-Q's language about hash calculations "provided to the pool operator" and the company's proportion of pool work is the disclosure of that arrangement. It is a risk-and-smoothing choice, told in the revenue policy.

What the filing does not do here is hand over a single cost-per-coin headline in these particular excerpts; the disclosed material is the recognition mechanism, and that is the part worth grounding. The honest read is that MARA's revenue is structurally exposed to two variables it does not control — total network hash and network difficulty — and one it does: how much hash it brings. Everything in a miner's strategy, from fleet upgrades to power contracts, is an attempt to keep its slice of the network from eroding faster than its costs fall.

That is why the formula, not the slogan, is the story. Marathon can mine more bitcoin in absolute terms and still see its economics tighten if difficulty outruns it, because the 10-Q's revenue formula is a share of a moving total. Reading the filing strips the romance out of mining and leaves the arithmetic: hash as a percent of the network, scaled by difficulty, multiplied through. Disclosure or it didn't happen — and Marathon discloses exactly how the coins it earns get counted.