Marathon Digital Stock Falls Nearly 5% in Morning Trading

Marathon Digital(MARA)$ said Tuesday it will restate its full year 2021 and quarterly earnings for that year and for the first three quarters of 2022 due to accounting errors.

Marathon Digital stock falls nearly 5% in morning trading.

Specifically, the bitcoin miner determined that it had incorrectly calculated impairment on a daily basis of its digital assets and it had incorrectly accounted for revenue from a bitcoin mining pool that it had participated in and operated in late 2021 and early 2022.

Now that Marathon Digital (MARA) needs to restate its previously reported financial statements for 2021 and 2022, the company will not be able to file its 2022 annual 10-K statement by the filing deadline of March 1, it said in a filing. It cancelled its conference call for Q4 earnings and will postpone the publication of its financial results.

The company said its method for calculating the impairment of digital assets, chiefly bitcoin (BTC-USD), on a daily basis using a standard cutoff time wasn't in compliance with a requirement that calls for the intraday low price to be used.

Regarding the bitcoin mining pool's revenue recognition, Marathon (MARA) had determined that the company acted as an agent in the pool, which included a small number of unrelated third-party participants. As a result, it recorded revenue on a net basis, subtracting any revenue allocated to the third-party pool participants from its revenue as the operator of the pool.

It later found out that it's assessment was incorrect and should have concluded that it acted as principal. That means the company should have recorded gross revenue rather than net revenue.

Marathon now estimates that both its revenue and cost of revenue for the year ended Dec. 31, 202 were understated. Revenue and cost of revenue, energy, hosting and other, are expected to increase in the restated 2021 numbers.

The restatement of the impacted financial statement isn't expected to have any effect on total margin, operating income or net income in 2021 or any of the interim periods in 2021 or 2022, it said.

Marathon Digital (MARA) also said it no longer operates a pool that includes third parties.

The company was expected to post a Q4 loss per share of $0.17 and revenue of $33.98M, according to consensus estimates.