Foundry Digital to Launch Institutional Zcash Mining Pool

Foundry Digital, one of the largest Bitcoin mining pools on earth by hashrate, is moving into Zcash — announcing plans to launch an institutional-grade ZEC mining pool by April 2026 that would bring formal U.S. compliance frameworks to a network that has largely operated without them. CEO Mike Colyer framed it as solving an infrastructure gap. But read the numbers on hashprice and it's hard not to see a mining giant hedging a very uncomfortable bet.

What Is Foundry's Zcash Mining Pool?

A compliance-first platform for institutional miners

The pool is built from the ground up for regulated operators — public companies, large mining firms, and anyone who has a legal department looking over their shoulder. Foundry Digital says the offering will include rigorous know-your-customer and anti-money laundering verification for all participants, alongside payout reporting tools designed for daily reconciliation. Payouts will flow through transparent Zcash addresses — not shielded ones — which keeps the whole operation visible for auditors.

The pool will run on a Pay Per Last N Shares model, which Colyer called 'fully auditable' in a statement. Fees were not disclosed, with the company saying only it plans to offer 'competitive pool fee rates.' There's no minimum hashrate to join, a detail Colyer said reflects the fact that the Zcash mining market is still relatively young. Foundry plans to apply the same operational framework it already uses for its Bitcoin pool — one that has passed both SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance audits. That's a credential set most Zcash pools simply don't have.

Operations will be U.S.-based, with a dedicated support team. Competing pools like F2Pool, 2Miners, and ViaBTC are already in the Zcash market, but none carry the institutional compliance pedigree Foundry is positioning around.

Institutional and public miners who want exposure to zcash have had no US-based, compliant, purpose-built infrastructure to do it through.

Why Is ZEC Outperforming Every Other Privacy Coin?

670% gains in 12 months — and the structural reason behind them

Privacy coins are having a moment. New crypto tax reporting rules that took effect across the European Union at the start of this year, combined with growing onchain surveillance capabilities, have pushed fresh demand toward financial anonymity tools. ZEC has been the biggest winner in that environment — up more than 670% over the past 12 months. Monero managed 72% in the same window. DASH came in at 51%. That's not even close.

The divergence almost certainly traces back to Zcash's hybrid privacy model. Shielded transactions — fully anonymous — are optional. Users can choose selective disclosure, which makes ZEC palatable for exchanges and custody providers that need audit trails. That flexibility has attracted institutional capital that a fully opaque network like Monero can't easily court. A Winklevoss-backed treasury firm has accumulated ZEC. The Grayscale Zcash Trust exists. Neither of those facts is trivial.

That accumulation story is part of what Colyer was pointing at when he said Zcash has 'matured into an institutional-grade asset.' The infrastructure argument — that mining hasn't kept pace with the asset's maturity — is genuine. But the timing, with margins crushed elsewhere, is worth keeping in mind.

Bitcoin's Hashprice Problem Is the Elephant in the Room

Colyer pushed back, firmly, on the idea that declining Bitcoin margins drove this decision. 'We evaluate opportunities based on where institutional infrastructure is needed, not on bitcoin margins at any given moment,' he said. 'Foundry's bitcoin mining business is strong and remains our core foundation.' That's a clean line. It's also the line every mining executive uses before announcing diversification.

The data tells a blunter story. Bitcoin's price ran to nearly $125,000 late last year before correcting to roughly $69,500 today. Hashprice — a measure of the expected daily value of 1 TH/s of hashing power — fell from over $60 to $30 per petahash during that same period. That's a roughly 50% drop in per-unit mining revenue. The 2024 halving cut block rewards in half while difficulty kept climbing. Many large mining operations have started poking around other proof-of-work networks for exactly this reason.

Call it diversification, call it hedging — either way, the timing is not coincidental. Foundry is the biggest name to enter the Zcash mining space in a meaningful way, and it's doing so at precisely the moment Bitcoin mining economics became noticeably tighter for everyone.

What Does This Mean for the Zcash Network?

Zcash launched in 2016 built on zero-knowledge proof technology — specifically a cryptographic method called zk-SNARKs, which validates transactions without revealing the sender, receiver, or amount. Like Bitcoin, it runs on proof-of-work. Like Bitcoin, it has a 21 million coin supply cap. Blocks come roughly every 75 seconds, faster than Bitcoin's 10-minute target. The mining algorithm is Equihash — memory-intensive by design, different from Bitcoin's SHA-256.

Mining pools matter a lot in this context. Because network difficulty keeps individual block-solving unlikely for most miners, pools bundle hashrate and split rewards proportionally. Large pools shape the stability and decentralization of a network. Foundry entering Zcash with institutional scale is not a small thing for a network whose current pool operators are mostly smaller, globally distributed outfits operating without formal compliance programs.

Foundry expects demand specifically from North American miners already operating in regulated environments — firms with corporate governance requirements, audit obligations, and the kind of formal reporting stack that existing Zcash pools just don't support. If the pool launches on schedule, it would represent one of the most significant institutional entries into the Zcash mining space since the network's launch a decade ago. Whether that's good for decentralization is a separate question entirely.

Is Foundry Going Multi-Chain?

Colyer was careful here. Asked whether Zcash signals a broader multi-asset mining strategy, he said Foundry's focus is 'squarely on bitcoin and zcash' for now — while adding that the company is 'always evaluating opportunities' that align with its mission and the needs of institutional miners. That's not a no. That's a very practiced non-answer.

For miners already in the Foundry ecosystem, this is probably welcome news. Having a compliant ZEC pool available through a trusted operator they already work with lowers the barrier to diversifying their own revenue streams — without having to build out new vendor relationships or compliance reviews from scratch.

Whether Foundry's Bitcoin pool business is genuinely 'strong' or whether this Zcash move is the first move of several is something only the next few quarters will answer.