Cody McGrath 
Canadian mining company Hut 8 has seen its Bitcoin holdings reach the 8,000 Bitcoin (BTC) milestone, it has also continued to HODL despite tough market conditions.
Hut 8 reported its most recent mining activity for August 2022, raising its monthly Bitcoin holdings by 375 BTC to a total of 8,111 BTC. Hut 8 announced that, during the month, it mined 12.1 BTC per day at a rate of 125.8 BTC per exahash.
As a result of the present cryptocurrency bear market, other mining companies have been forced to sell some of their BTC holdings, but Hut 8 has been able to stick to its “long-standing HODL policy” and maintain ownership of all of its mined BTC.
The crypto miner also disclosed that 180 Nvidia GPUs had been deployed at its primary data center in Kelowna, Canada. The center now mines Ether (ETH), however after the Merge in September 2022, its GPU mining equipment will be used to render VFX, perform machine learning, or perform artificial intelligence tasks.
The addition of Chinese ASIC MicroBT miners by Hut 8 has also contributed to the company’s continuous expansion of mining capacity. In October 2021, the company paid $58.7 million for 12,000 brand-new MicroBT M30S, M30S+, and M30S++ miners, and it has since received orders for 1000 further units each month until 2022.
The possible effects of Ethereum’s Merge on other cryptocurrencies that use Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus methods have been raised by industry professionals. Many miners who have protected the Ethereum blockchain will turn to other PoW chains if Ethereum switches to the proof-of-stake controlled Beacon Chain.
Early in September, the blockchain explorer and mining pool operator BTC.com established an ETC pool offering three months of zero-fee mining, which resulted in a surge in the token value of Ethereum Classic (ETC) of more than 10%.