Bitcoin’s wild decade produced two very different stories on Wall Street. MARA Holdings (NASDAQ: MARA | MARA Price Prediction), then known as Marathon Digital, focused on running mining rigs, while Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), the software firm formerly known as MicroStrategy, bet its balance sheet on holding the coins themselves. Same theme, vastly different outcomes.

Two Roads Into the Same Trade

MARA spent the decade pivoting from a patent-licensing shell into one of the largest public bitcoin miners, recently scaling to 72.2 EH/s of energized hash rate and announcing a Starwood joint venture to convert roughly 90% of non-hosted capacity to AI and HPC. The cost has been brutal: a…