Foundry Digital announced plans to launch a Zcash mining pool next month, targeting publicly traded companies and financial institutions that currently lack the infrastructure to validate Zcash transactions. This initiative comes from the operator of Bitcoin’s leading mining pool, which aims to allow users to earn the privacy-focused cryptocurrency through shared resources.
CEO Mike Colyer emphasized that Zcash has matured into an “institutional-grade asset” since its launch nearly a decade ago, asserting its vital role in promoting financial privacy. The mining pool will be structured similarly to “Foundry USA,” which accounts for around 31% of Bitcoin’s total hashrate. Over the past month, Foundry USA has mined approximately 4,150 Bitcoin, valued currently at around $290 million.
Foundry’s Zcash pool is designed to reduce compliance and counterparty risks, with operations based in the U.S. The global mining landscape remains diverse, featuring significant activities out of China despite recent government crackdowns. A spokesperson indicated that the decision to expand into Zcash was driven by an identified gap in the market rather than current profitability levels in Bitcoin mining. Rising energy costs have pushed multiple Bitcoin mining firms to explore opportunities linked to AI data centers, but Foundry reinforced that its Bitcoin mining operations remain solid and serve as the company’s core foundation.
The new Zcash mining pool will include 24/7 technical support for participants and provide reporting tools to ensure payouts are auditable. As of Wednesday, Zcash was trading around $215, reflecting a 4.5% drop in value over the past day, yet demonstrating a remarkable increase of over 600% in the past year.
Mining pools collectively harness the computational power of individual miners to facilitate block-solving, allowing them to share rewards more consistently and equitably. Foundry USA operates alongside other notable U.S.-based pools like Ocean and Luxor. Similar to Bitcoin, Zcash operates on a proof-of-work consensus mechanism, where miners earn new coins by using energy-intensive machines to perform complex calculations, typically every 75 seconds, to secure the network.
Miners’ computing power for Zcash is measured in “Gigasols per second” (GSol/s), indicating the number of potential solutions they can find for the next block. Notably, Zcash’s hash rate has surged from 8.1 GSol/s to 13.8 GSol/s since early September, suggesting increased resource investment in the network.
Despite the operational similarities between Zcash and Bitcoin, the spokesperson clarified that they employ fundamentally different proof-of-work algorithms and thus require different hardware configurations. Currently, the leading Zcash mining pool controlled by ViaBTC commands approximately 30% of the network’s hashrate, but Foundry’s new entry could potentially shift this dynamic in the near future.
