Foundry Digital, one of the largest Bitcoin mining pools by hashrate, said it plans to introduce zcash ($ZEC) By next month, mining pools will expand beyond BTC, with large institutional operators joining the privacy-focused network.
With the new pool, Foundry aims to provide zcash miners with a US-based platform designed around the compliance checks, reporting standards, and operational controls often required by public companies and large corporations.
The move addresses what Foundry describes as a gap in the Zcash infrastructure. Although the cryptocurrency has been around for nearly a decade, much of its mining ecosystem still consists of small global pools, often operating outside of formal compliance frameworks.
“Zcash has grown into an asset for institutional investors, but the mining infrastructure supporting it has not kept up,” Foundry CEO Mike Collier said in a statement shared with CoinDesk.
Bet on privacy
The expansion comes as privacy-focused cryptocurrencies are gaining renewed attention across markets as new crypto tax reporting rules with the threat of asset seizure were introduced across the European Union at the beginning of the year, on-chain analytics continues to evolve, and demand for financial anonymity grows.
Zcash and other privacy coins including monero ($XMR) and dash ($dash) has regained interest and prices have skyrocketed. $ZEC It has significantly outperformed, increasing over 670% over the past 12 months. $XMRincreased by 72% over the same period; $dash has increased by 51%.
$ZECThe superior performance of can be attributed to the hybrid privacy model. This model makes protected (fully anonymous) transactions optional with selective disclosure. This means that the storage and exchange of transactions is transparent and can attract accumulation into Winklevoss-backed treasury companies and Grayscale Zcash trusts.
Foundry’s move to zcash may also reflect broader changes in the mining economics. Bitcoin mining profitability has shrunk since the halving in 2024, when block rewards were halved while mining difficulty skyrocketed.
In an interview with CoinDesk, Coiler dismissed the idea that the move was primarily a response to declining Bitcoin margins.
“We evaluate opportunities based on where institutional infrastructure is needed, not Bitcoin margins at any given time,” he said. “Foundry’s Bitcoin mining business is strong and remains our core foundation.”
Coyler said the expansion was to overcome an identified gap in the compliant Zcash infrastructure. “Institutions and public miners that wanted exposure to zcash did not have a compliant, dedicated US-based infrastructure to do so,” he added.
As for whether this move signals a broader multi-chain strategy, Coiler said the company’s focus is “squarely on Bitcoin and Zcash” for now, but added that Foundry is “constantly evaluating opportunities” that align with its mission and the demands of institutional miners.
The price of Bitcoin rose significantly to nearly $125,000 at the end of last year, but the price has since corrected and currently stands at $69,500. This caused the hash price, which represents the expected value of 1 TH/s of hash power per day, to drop from more than $60 per petahash to $30 per petahash.
As margins shrink, many large mining companies are beginning 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 their key details private. Using a cryptographic technique known as zk-SNARK, Zcash can verify that a transaction is valid without revealing the sender, recipient, or amount.
Similar to Bitcoin, the Zcash network relies on proof-of-work mining to secure the blockchain, where miners use specialized hardware to solve complex mathematical puzzles to secure the network. When a miner or mining pool solves one of these puzzles, a new block of transactions is added to the chain and they earn rewards with newly issued transactions. $ZEC Tokens and transaction fees.
Zcash blocks are generated approximately every 75 seconds, which is faster than Bitcoin blocks, which are generated every 10 minutes. Still, both shared a supply cap of 21 million coins. The mining process uses an algorithm called Equihash. This is different from Bitcoin’s SHA-256, which is designed to require a large amount of memory during calculation.
The network difficulty helps keep the time between block generation constant, but it also means that it is less likely that a block can be solved alone. As a result, miners gather into groups known as mining pools, where participants combine their computing power and share rewards based on the amount of work they contribute. Large pools control a large portion of the total hashrate, which can impact network stability and decentralization.
Foundry’s zcash pool
Foundry said its zcash pool includes participant identity checks with rigorous customer recognition and anti-money laundering compliance, transparent payment calculations, and reporting tools for institutional users. It features a dedicated support team and its operations are based in the United States.
The company plans to apply the same operational framework used in its Bitcoin pool, which has undergone SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance audits, the company said.
Mining rewards will be distributed through transparent Zcash addresses, rather than shielded addresses, the company said. The pool will make payments to miners based on a Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS) model, which Coiler said is “fully auditable” and provides detailed data to support daily payment adjustments.
Foundry did not disclose fees for miners, saying only that it offers “competitive pool fee rates.” Coiler said there is no minimum hashrate threshold to join the pool, noting that the Zcash mining ecosystem is still emerging.
The company expects demand from miners already operating in regulated environments such as North America. Many of these companies rely on formal reporting systems and compliance programs to meet their corporate governance requirements.
If the zcash pool launches as planned in 2026, it will be the largest institutional investment into the Zcash mining ecosystem to date. Other major mining pools operating within it include F2Pool, 2Miners, and ViaBTC.
