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Bitcoin miners have historically sold BTC as they produced it to cover operating costs. But over the past couple of years a “HODL” strategy has permeated the industry as participants have opted to pay off expenses with debt instead.

Miners racked up much bitcoin- and equipment-backed financing to raise a combined $4 billion in capital[1] for daily expenditures as bids to keep increasing bitcoin treasuries rose in the industry.

While that strategy worked fine during the 2020-2021 bull market, when the bitcoin price was increasing and capital was easier to raise, over-leveraged miners have come under extreme pressure this quarter as the cryptocurrency lost over 70% of its U.S. dollar value.

Consequently, with current macroeconomic conditions impairing companies’ abilities to raise capital and a bleeding bitcoin price, many public miners saw themselves with no other option than to give up on their HODL mentality.

In May, most public miners started selling considerable amounts of bitcoin[2] to pay off debt or recurring costs, and the trend has apparently not died off. While some have sold only periodically their mined BTC since then, others[3] have opted to part ways with some of the coins they had put in the balance sheet in previous months.

In June, Riot Blockchain sold 300 BTC[4], while CleanSpark sold 328[5]. Core Scientific, however, went a bit further and dumped 78.6% of its bitcoin holdings for $167 million, which it said[6] “were primarily used for payments for ASIC servers, capital investments in additional data center capacity and scheduled repayment of debt.” The firm added that it will “continue to sell self-mined bitcoins to pay operating expenses, fund growth, retire debt and maintain liquidity.” Bitfarms also sold a considerable chunk of

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