TL;DR:
Foundry Digital, the largest Bitcoin mining pool by hashrate, formally launched a new mining operation focused on Zcash (ZEC), the privacy cryptocurrency based on zero-knowledge proofs. According to the company’s own data, the pool already concentrates nearly 30% of the network’s total hashrate, just weeks after the initial announcement made in March.
Foundry Digital, headquartered in Rochester, New York, is a subsidiary of Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group. Its CEO, Mike Colyer, explained in an interview with Fortune that the decision to incorporate Zcash responds to growing institutional interest in so-called privacy coins. Several institutional miners, including publicly traded companies, joined the pool before its official debut.
Unlike competitors such as Monero, Zcash supports selective transaction disclosure, making it compatible with the regulatory requirements of banks and financial institutions. Its architecture uses zk-SNARKs to verify transactions without revealing the sender, recipient, or amounts. This design, according to Foundry’s CEO, is the primary driver of institutional demand.
The pool distributes rewards through transparent addresses and applies the pay-per-last-N-shares (PPLNS) model, which calculates payments based on each participant’s historical contributions. Access to the pool is restricted to regulated entities.
Alongside the pool, Foundry unveiled Zcashinfo.com, a block explorer that provides real-time data on pool rankings, hashrate distribution, blocks produced, and mining difficulty. Zcash operates on the Equihash algorithm, designed to require large amounts of memory, and produces blocks approximately every 75 seconds, compared to Bitcoin’s 10 minutes.
The price of ZEC accumulated a gain of over 75% in the 30 days prior to the official launch, well above the 7% increase recorded by the broader market during the same period. Zcash’s market capitalization stands at around $6.3 billion, placing it at approximately position 15 among all cryptocurrencies.
