Foundry Expands into Zcash Mining Pool as Bitcoin Hashprice Slides

Foundry Digital plans to launch an institutional-grade Zcash mining pool in April, expanding the largest Bitcoin mining pool operator into the privacy-focused cryptocurrency network.

The Rochester, New York-based company said on Wednesday the new service is designed to provide a compliant mining infrastructure for Zcash that can support institutional and publicly traded miners. Foundry currently operates Foundry USA Pool, the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pool by hashrate.

The company said the launch addresses what it sees as a gap in Zcash’s mining ecosystem, where much of the existing infrastructure has historically been run by smaller global pools with fewer compliance frameworks.

The timing also aligns with a broader rally in Zcash itself. Network hashrate has more than doubled from about 6.5 GH/s in mid-2025 to above 14 GH/s in recent readings. Over the same period, the price of Zcash surged from $65 to nearly $700, then plunged to the low $ 200s.

“Zcash has matured into an institutional-grade asset, but the mining infrastructure supporting it hasn’t kept pace,” Foundry CEO Mike Colyer said in a statement. “With the launch of our Zcash pool, we are bringing to Zcash the same compliance, transparency, and operational excellence that made Foundry USA Pool the trusted standard for Bitcoin miners.”

Foundry’s push also fits with the increasingly pro-Zcash tone from its parent company. DCG founder and CEO Barry Silbert claimed in February that 5% to 10% of Bitcoin capital could eventually move into privacy-focused crypto like Zcash, while also backing Grayscale’s effort to convert its Zcash Trust into an ETP.

The new pool will operate from the United States and include identity verification checks and compliance controls for participants, according to Foundry. Mining rewards will be distributed through transparent Zcash addresses rather than shielded ones, and the service will use a Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS) payout model designed to provide auditable reward calculations.

Zcash launched in 2016 as a privacy-focused cryptocurrency built on zero-knowledge proof technology known as zk-SNARKs, which allows transactions to be verified without revealing sensitive details such as wallet addresses or transaction amounts. Like Bitcoin, the network relies on proof-of-work mining and caps total supply at 21 million coins.

Blocks on the Zcash network are produced roughly every 75 seconds, compared with Bitcoin’s roughly 10-minute block interval, and mining uses the Equihash algorithm rather than Bitcoin’s SHA-256.

Because the probability of solving blocks individually is low, miners typically join mining pools that combine computing power and distribute rewards among participants. Foundry’s entry could introduce one of the largest institutional operators into the Zcash mining ecosystem.

Zooko Wilcox, founder of Zcash and chief product officer at Shielded Labs, said the launch could help diversify the network’s hashrate distribution.

“This will spread out the Zcash mining hashpower from its current concentration in a single pool, and hopefully it will bring in new Zcash miners who trust Foundry to operate a high-quality service,” Wilcox said in the statement.

Foundry said it 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.

The move comes as some mining firms explore additional proof-of-work networks beyond Bitcoin as mining economics tighten following the 2024 halving. Bitcoin mining margins have compressed as block rewards were cut in half while network difficulty continued to rise, pushing down hashprice — a measure of expected revenue per unit of computing power.