Foundry Digital, one of the largest Bitcoin mining pools by hashrate, has announced plans to introduce a zcash (ZEC) mining pool by next month, expanding beyond BTC and integrating a large institutional operator into the privacy-focused network.
With this new pool, Foundry aims to offer Zcash miners a US-based platform designed around the compliance checks, reporting standards, and operational controls often required by public companies and large enterprises.
The move addresses what Foundry describes as a gap in Zcash infrastructure. Although cryptocurrency has been around for almost a decade, much of its mining ecosystem still consists of small global pools that often operate outside of formal compliance frameworks.
“Zcash has become an institutional-grade asset, but the mining infrastructure that supports it has not kept pace,” said Foundry CEO Mike Colyer in a statement shared with CoinDesk.
Bet on confidentiality
The expansion comes as privacy-focused cryptocurrencies fall back into the market, as new cryptocurrency tax reporting rules, with threat of asset seizure, came into force in the European Union earlier this year and on-chain analytics continues to expand, leading to growing demand for financial anonymity.
Zcash, along with other privacy coins including monero (XMR) and dash (DASH), have seen a surge in interest that has contributed to their prices rising. ZEC has seen significant outperformance, up over 670% over the past 12 months, compared to XMR’s 72% rise over the same period, while DASH is up 51%.
ZEC’s outperformance can likely be attributed to its hybrid privacy model, which makes protected – completely anonymous – transactions optional with selective disclosure. This means transactions can be transparent for custody and trading, and attract accumulation from a Winklevoss-backed treasury company as well as in the Grayscale Zcash Trust.
Foundry’s move toward zcash also likely reflects broader changes in the mining economy. Bitcoin mining profitability tightened after the 2024 halving, which halved block rewards while mining difficulty increased.
Speaking to CoinDesk, Coyler pushed back on the idea that the move was primarily a response to declining Bitcoin margins.
“We evaluate opportunities based on where institutional infrastructure is needed, not based on Bitcoin margins at any given time,” he said. “Foundry’s Bitcoin mining business is strong and remains our foundation.”
The expansion, Coyler said, addressed an identified gap in compliant Zcash infrastructure. “Institutional and public miners who wish to gain exposure to zcash do not have a compliant, US-based infrastructure specifically designed to achieve this,” he added.
As for whether the move speaks to a broader multi-chain strategy, Coyler said the company is focused “entirely on Bitcoin and Zcash” for now, although he added that Foundry is “always evaluating opportunities” that fit its mission and the demands of institutional miners.
While the price of bitcoin saw a significant rise to nearly $125,000 late last year, its price has since corrected to now stand at $69,500. This saw the hash price, a measure of the expected value of 1 TH/s of hashing power per day, fall from over $60 to $30 per petahash.
As margins shrink, many large mining companies have begun to explore other proof-of-work networks to diversify their revenue.
Zcash mining infrastructure
Zcash was launched in 2016 as a privacy-focused cryptocurrency built on zero-knowledge proof technology. The network allows users to send transactions on a public blockchain while keeping key details private. Through a cryptographic method known as zk-SNARKs, Zcash can verify that a transaction is valid without revealing the sender, recipient, or amount involved.
Like Bitcoin, the Zcash network relies on proof-of-work mining to secure its blockchain and miners use specialized hardware to solve complex mathematical puzzles to secure the network. When a miner or mining pool solves one of these puzzles, they add a new block of transactions to the chain and earn a reward in newly issued ZEC tokens as well as transaction fees.
Zcash blocks are produced approximately every 75 seconds, faster than Bitcoin blocks which are produced every 10 minutes. Yet the two shared a supply cap of 21 million coins. The mining process uses an algorithm called Equihash, which differs from Bitcoin’s SHA-256 and was designed to require large amounts of memory during calculation.
The difficulty of the network, which allows the time between block production to remain consistent, means that the probability of solving a single block is low. As a result, miners group together into so-called mining pools, in which participants combine their computing power and share rewards based on the amount of work they contribute. Large pools can influence the stability and decentralization of a network because they control a significant portion of its total hashrate.
Foundry’s zcash pool
Foundry said its zcash pool will include identity verification checks for participants through rigorous know-your-customer and anti-money laundering compliance, transparent payment calculations and reporting tools for institutional users. It will feature a dedicated support team and its operations will be based in the United States.
The company plans to apply the same operational framework used by its Bitcoin pool, which has undergone SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance audits, it said.
Mining rewards will be distributed via transparent, unprotected Zcash addresses, the company said. The pool will pay miners on a Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS) model, which Coyler says is “fully auditable” and provides detailed data supporting daily payment reconciliation.
Foundry did not disclose fees for miners, saying only that it would offer “competitive pool fee rates.” There will be no minimum hashrate threshold to join the pool, Coyler said, noting that the Zcash mining ecosystem is still emerging.
The company expects demand from miners already operating in regulated environments like North America. Many of these companies rely on formal reporting systems and compliance programs to meet corporate governance requirements.
If the zcash pool launches as planned in 2026, it would be one of the largest institutional entries into the Zcash mining ecosystem to date. Other major mining pools operating there include F2Pool, 2Miners and ViaBTC.
