Foundry, the operator behind the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pool, is moving into Zcash, announcing plans to launch an institutional-grade ZEC mining pool aimed at public companies and other institutional miners.
In a press release, Foundry said the new pool is designed to plug a gap in Zcash’s mining infrastructure by offering the kind of compliance, reliability and scale that institutions expect. Foundry already runs Foundry USA—the top Bitcoin pool by total hashrate—and says the same US-based operational model will power its ZEC pool, slated to go live in April 2026.
“Zcash has matured into an institutional-grade asset, but the mining infrastructure supporting it hasn’t kept pace,” Foundry CEO Mike Colyer said, emphasizing the need for enterprise-focused tooling in the Zcash ecosystem.
Why Zcash matters
Launched in 2016, Zcash is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency that blends advanced privacy technology with on-chain verifiability. Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum—where transaction data is visible on a public ledger—Zcash can use cryptographic techniques to hide transaction details by default, while still allowing verification of balances and consensus. The press release framed Zcash as an example of how “financial privacy and compliant digital infrastructure can coexist.”
Mining and tokenomics
Zcash’s protocol was originally forked from Bitcoin, so its mining economics look familiar: miners earn block rewards for adding blocks, the supply increases through mining, and a hard cap is set at 21 million ZEC. ZEC’s block reward also undergoes periodic halving roughly every four years, similar to Bitcoin.
Network growth and market context
Foundry’s announcement comes as the Zcash network has seen a notable uptick in computational power. BitInfoCharts data shows network hashrate climbing from under 8 GH/s in October to more than 13 GH/s today—an indication of rising mining activity and competition. Despite the hashrate surge, ZEC’s market price was trading around $209 at the time of writing, down more than 11% over the past week.
Industry reaction
Zooko Wilcox, Zcash’s founder and chief product officer at Shielded Labs (an independent ZEC support organization based in Switzerland), welcomed Foundry’s entry: “We at Shielded Labs are delighted that Foundry—the largest Bitcoin mining pool, and one based in North America—is launching an enterprise-grade Zcash mining pool.”
What to watch
Foundry’s institutional-focused pool could accelerate professional capital entering Zcash mining by offering US-based operations and enterprise features. If the pool launches as planned next April, expect continued attention to ZEC hashrate, miner centralization metrics, and how new institutional infrastructure affects the network’s decentralization and privacy dynamics.
Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news
