Canadian mining firm Hut 8 saw its Bitcoin holdings surpass the 8,000 Bitcoin (BTC) mark as it continues to accumulate self-mined holdings through depressed cryptocurrency market conditions.

Hut 8 released its latest mining report for August 2022, increasing its Bitcoin holdings by 375 BTC for the month to take its total reserves to 8,111 BTC. Hut 8 reported that it had mined 12.1 BTC per day at a rate of 125.8 BTC per exahash for the month.

While other mining operators have been forced to sell portions of their BTC holdings amid the ongoing cryptocurrency bear market, Hut 8 has managed to continue its self-described “long-standing HODL strategy” and still holds all of its mined BTC.

Hut 8 also announced that it had installed 180 Nvidia GPUs at its main data center in Kelowna, Canada. The center currently mines Ether (ETH) but with the Merge set to take place in September 2022, its GPU mining equipment will be used to provide artificial intelligence, machine learning or VFX rendering services.

Hut 8 has also continued increasing its mining capacity with the acquisition of Chinese ASIC MicroBT miners. The firm paid $58.7 million for 12,000 new MicroBT M30S, M30S+ and M30S++ miners in October 2021 and has received orders of 1000 machines monthly through 2022.

Industry experts have warned of the potential implications of Ethereum’s Merge on other cryptocurrencies that run on Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithms. Once Ethereum transitions to the proof-of-stake operated Beacon Chain, many miners that have secured the Ethereum blockchain will be looking to other PoW chains to continue mining.

Ethereum Classic (ETC) saw its token value increase by more than 10% in early September as blockchain explorer and mining pool operator BTC.com launched an ETC pool featuring zero-fee mining over a three-month period.