Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings (MARA) stock outperformed peers on Friday, even after its first quarter results missed Wall Street’s estimates, as the company’s focus on lowering costs is seen as positive by analysts.

Jefferies analysts said that with the bitcoin BTC price improving in the second quarter of this year and MARA focusing on more sustainable energy sources such as solar and flared gas-driven data centers, power costs should come down in the coming quarters and help margins.

«MARA is expanding infrastructure at its 114 MW wind farm and has fully energized its 25 MW micro flared gas data center, both of which should drive down power costs,» said analyst Jonathan Petersen in a note.

If the mining firm continues to buy up more of such power sources, it would help the company’s profitability, Petersen wrote. «Continued acquisition of power assets is expected to further reduce energy costs, expand margins, and better prepare the firm for the next halving.» Peterson reiterated his hold rating on the stock, while raising the price target to $16 from $13.

Bitcoin mining, once a very profitable business, has seen its profit margins crash drastically during the last bear market and even more so after the recent halving that cut the rewards by half. To make matters worse, rising power costs for mining have continued to plague the margins.

This squeeze has forced most miners to diversify their business into other sources of revenue, including hosting artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) data centers. MARA was among the few miners that didn’t jump into the AI sector right away, but rather focused on other avenues of diversification, such as transaction revenue services, mining pool, buying bitcoin in the open market and lowering power costs via green energy sources.

The last point about lower power cost seemed to have struck a chord with the market.

H.C. Wainwright analyst Kevin Dede said that this is what separates MARA from its mining peers: «Commentary last night made it clear the company remains focused on technology development in its core vertical of power conversion … with a peeled eye on driving energy costs to zero.»

«We rehash this here in distancing MARA’s strategy against mining competitors gently or forcefully migrating their mining businesses to address the rapidly evolving HPC opportunity,» he said.

Dede, who has a buy rating and price target of $28, also seemed to echo the sentiment that MARA will be able to lower costs by focusing on these types of power sources.

«Our opinion on that aside for now, we agree with MARA’s overarching objective to create opportunities by exploiting unused power or improving the efficiency of used power,» he said.

MARA’s shares rose as much as 9% on Friday, while the CoinShares Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI) has fallen about 0.3%.

Read more: MARA Holdings Cut to Sell at Compass Point Ahead of Earnings, Citing Cash Burn

U.S. President Donald Trump has come a long way since he said the value of crypto was “based on thin air” in 2019. So much so that he is now one of the sector’s largest proponents, foraying into memecoins, DeFi, NFTs, and even stablecoins.

A new report by the State Democracy Defenders Fund estimates that Trump’s family has increased their net worth by $2.9 billion thanks to crypto, and that now 40% of that net worth is being held in crypto assets.

His deepening ties to the industry have reverberated across the political landscape, to the point that a broadly bipartisan stablecoin bill failed in a key vote Thursday after Democrats expressed concern about the extent to which he is profiting off the sector.

Trump’s support helped spark a continued bull market after his election victory in November, a market that’s been dominated by two trends: memecoins and institutional adoption of bitcoin via ETFs. While the latter is the province of, generally, institutional investors and providers, it’s the memecoin business that puts retail investors at risk and is potentially ripe for exploitation.

On Thursday, Solidus Labs claimed that 98% of memecoins issued on the token creation platform pump.fun were rug pulls or pump-and-dump schemes. The platform has since refuted the report’s claims.

Another analysis by Chainalysis, cited by CNBC, suggested that the vast majority of TRUMP token holders lost money.

A memecoin is a type of crypto token with no inherent value, often based, as the name suggests, on a meme or cartoon character. Popular examples of this are dogecoin (DOGE), shiba inu (SHIB) and pepe (PEPE). The craze reached a climax in January when Trump touted his own TRUMP token on social media, followed by MELANIA— named after his wife.

TRUMP, which hit a day-one peak of $77.26, is now trading at $10.80, down a whopping 86%. MELANIA slumped even further, losing more than 97% of its value in four months to trade recently at 33 cents.

The hype around Trump’s social media post led to a flurry of trading activity. Data from Chainalysis reveals that 760,000 wallets, mainly belonging to retail investors, lost money on the TRUMP token.

A small group of people, however, was immune to those losses. The Chainanalysis data show 58 wallets made profits in excess of $10 million. The token’s creators netted a whopping $320 million in trading fees, although it’s worth noting that around 5% of the fees went to the decentralized exchange Meteora, which hosted the launch.

MELANIA was allegedly scooped up by a group of insiders before it was advertised on social media in a technique known as “sniping.” This group of insiders made $100 million on MELANIA tokens by swapping tokens for USDC after its price doubled, according to an investigation by the Financial Times.

One insider with access to the tokens before they went live was Kelsier Ventures’ Hayden Davis, who revealed his involvement during an interview in February. Davis was also the brains behind the botched LIBRA stablecoin that brought political chaos to Argentina.

In an interview with Coffeezilla in February, Davis said: “This is going to put me in a lot of danger. Which is fine, I’ll answer. I was a part of it [MELANIA]. I think the team did want to snipe it because of how big the snipe was on TRUMP. We definitely weren’t the big sniper, that was what we were trying to avoid. We didn’t take any liquidity out, zero.”

Trump’s crypto network

Trump’s foray into crypto isn’t limited to memecoins.

The U.S. president’s family is also behind World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform that raised around $590 million across two pre-sale rounds earlier this year. It raised funds at a time when the market was resting around all-time highs, so that figure of raised crypto is now much less. Arkham Intelligence data suggests that World Liberty Financial holds around $103 million worth of crypto.

Trump also attempted to ride the coattails of non-fungible token (NFT) hype in 2022, releasing a series of cartoons depicting the president as a superhero or a cartoon character. Trump made around $8 million from rolling out these NFTs, according to financial disclosures.

Most recently, there was the crypto dinner event, which saw Trump host a group of 25 TRUMP holders to a private dinner and tour of his Virginia golf club. A Bloomberg report reveals that 19 of those 25 holders were either foreign entities or used an offshore exchange banned in the U.S.

He’s set to host another dinner for the top 220 holders of his token later in May. U.S. Senators Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass. called for Trump’s impeachment, asking the U.S. Office of Government Ethics to investigate whether Trump violated federal ethics rules by inviting top investors.

The Trump family did not immediately respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.

Read more: Donald Trump Denies Claims of Profiting From TRUMP Token

It was a pretty positive week for crypto as prices rose, big deals were signed, and stablecoins continued to penetrate deep into the financial system. Even ETH, a perennial downer of late, rose sharply, reaching nearly $2300 at press time.

The CoinDesk 20, a barometer for the whole market, has risen 15%-plus since Monday.

Bitcoin was near ATH levels this week on the back of more positive “trade” news. Bearish positions were liquidated and ETF flows were up, Omkar Godbole reported.

ETH’s resurgence may have had something to do with its Pectra upgrade, which went off without a hitch (as Ethereum upgrades tend to). Pectra will make staking easier (and bigger) and boost efficiency. Margaux Nijkerk, our Ethereum reporter, had the news.

Coinbase signed the biggest acquisition in crypto history, a $2.9 billion deal for Deribit, a crypto options pioneer. Wall Street analysts said Coinbase is now a genuine player in derivatives, rivaling Binance.

Still, the deal couldn’t boost Coinbase’s stock price, which took a hit on tariff-affected Q1 earnings. Helene Braun wrote about that.

About those stablecoins… Meta (formerly Facebook) looks set to join the integration party; as does Stripe. But Senate Democrats are stalling the stablecoin bill, citing concerns about numerous questionable Trump crypto ventures. That delay could in turn affect the timetable for a more comprehensive “market structure” bill.

New Hampshire (“Live Free or Die”) signed the U.S.’s first state crypto reserve law. Many more are set to follow, Jesse Hamilton reported.

Meanwhile, Strike, which started as a bitcoin wallet, announced plans to get into bitcoin-based lending. Many expect the bitcoin credit market to expand from here.

This happened the same week, another bitcoin lender — disgraced Celsius Founder Alex Mashinsky — was sentenced to 12 years in prison for securities fraud related to the last cycle. Hopefully, bitcoin lending will work out better this time around.