The Digital Currency Group subsidiary's new pool already controls 30 per cent of Zcash's hashrate, alongside a new block explorer at Zcashinfo.com aimed at institutional miners.
Foundry Digital, the mining infrastructure arm of Digital Currency Group that operates the world's largest Bitcoin mining pool, officially launched its Zcash mining pool on Monday alongside a purpose-built block explorer at Zcashinfo.com — capping a five-week ramp during which the pool quietly captured roughly 30 per cent of the Zcash network's total hashrate.
The speed of that accumulation is striking. When Foundry announced the pool on 11 March, it was framed as a future product aimed at institutional and publicly traded miners who needed compliant infrastructure for proof-of-work assets beyond Bitcoin. Five weeks later, the pool is already producing close to a third of all new ZEC issuance, a level of dominance that took years to achieve on the Bitcoin side — where Foundry USA Pool also holds approximately 29 per cent of hashrate. That parity, reached almost immediately, says something about how starved the Zcash mining ecosystem was for a credible institutional-grade operator.
Zcash, launched in October 2016 with zero-knowledge proof technology that enables fully shielded transactions, uses the Equihash mining algorithm — a memory-intensive system designed to resist the kind of ASIC centralisation that has come to define Bitcoin mining. Blocks arrive roughly every 75 seconds, far faster than Bitcoin's ten-minute cycle, and the token trades at approximately $370 as of Monday afternoon. The network's total hashrate had been distributed among a collection of smaller pools, none of which offered the compliance frameworks, auditable payout structures or regulatory reporting that institutional miners require before allocating capital.
Foundry's pitch fills that gap directly. The pool uses a pay-per-last-N-shares model, distributes rewards through transparent addresses, and wraps the operation in the same compliance infrastructure that has made Foundry USA the dominant force in Bitcoin mining. Onboarding is focused on regulated entities — the kind of miners that need to justify every line item to auditors and shareholders. Mike Colyer, Foundry's chief executive, said the launch "reflects years of building infrastructure that institutions trust" and described Zcash as offering "something genuinely important to the digital asset ecosystem: verifiable financial privacy on a transparent blockchain."
That framing is deliberate. Privacy coins occupy an awkward regulatory position; several exchanges have delisted Zcash and its peers under pressure from regulators who view transaction shielding as inherently suspicious. South Korea banned privacy coins from regulated exchanges in 2021, and the European Union's transfer-of-funds regulation requires that crypto transactions include sender and recipient information — a requirement that sits uneasily alongside zero-knowledge proofs. Foundry's decision to build a compliant mining pool for Zcash is, in effect, an argument that privacy and regulation can coexist.
Zooko Wilcox, Zcash's founder, endorsed the launch, saying that Foundry's "mining pool and their Zcashinfo.com explorer are valuable additions to Zcash's infrastructure." The block explorer provides real-time data on pool rankings, hashrate distribution, blocks produced and mining difficulty — the kind of transparency layer that institutional participants expect before committing capital to a network.
The timing coincides with a broader resurgence of interest in privacy technology. The 20 millionth bitcoin was mined in March, drawing renewed attention to proof-of-work economics, and ZEC has risen 58 per cent in the past week alone — part of a wider rally that has seen privacy-focused tokens outperform the broader market. Whether that momentum sustains itself depends in part on whether the regulatory headwinds facing privacy coins continue to moderate or intensify; Foundry's institutional bet is that the direction of travel is toward acceptance.
The concentration risk is worth noting, though. A single pool controlling 30 per cent of any network's hashrate within weeks of launch is a centralisation vector, regardless of the operator's reputation. For Zcash, a network that exists specifically to protect user privacy, the question of who controls block production carries additional weight. A mining pool can't see the contents of shielded transactions, but it can decide which transactions to include in blocks — a power that grows more consequential as the pool's share of hashrate increases.
Foundry's Zcash pool is open to new institutional participants as of Monday.
