Foundry Launches Zcash Mining Pool, Grabs 30% of Hashrate

The world's largest Bitcoin mining pool operator just picked a side in the privacy-coin debate. Foundry, the Rochester-based company that already mines roughly 31% of all new Bitcoin, formally turned on a second pool on Monday dedicated to Zcash, the privacy-focused cryptocurrency. The launch is less a side bet and more a full-throated endorsement, one that lands at a moment when institutional miners are openly hunting for something beyond BTC to point their rigs at.

Why Is Foundry Betting on Zcash Now?

The answer, according to CEO Mike Colyer, is demand. Big demand, from exactly the type of customers nobody expected to care about privacy coins five years ago: publicly traded mining companies, well-capitalized institutional operators, and funds with billion-dollar digital-asset books. Colyer told reporters that the decision to spin up the pool came directly from client conversations, not a marketing hunch.

And the thesis is already cashing. Foundry said in a statement that the new pool has seen rapid and sustained growth from multiple institutional mining customers since going live, and that it already accounts for nearly a third of all new Zcash production. Think about that ratio for a second. A pool that opened its doors this week is already minting almost as much of the network's fresh supply as every other pool combined.

Colyer's framing is blunt. Institutions want optionality, they want yield diversification, and some of them actually want privacy, full stop. That last part is the one Wall Street quietly stopped apologizing for.

Well-capitalized U.S. operators have proven resilient. Our role is to support the broader ecosystem through our mining pools, which means we're focused on helping our clients navigate these dynamics rather than managing a fleet of our own.

What Makes Zcash Different From Every Other Privacy Coin

Zcash sits around 15th on the crypto league tables with a market cap near $6.3 billion. That is tiny against Bitcoin's $1.5 trillion or Ethereum's $270 billion, but it is not nothing, and the token's price action has been the loudest part of the story. Zcash is up more than 75% over the past 30 days. The broader market managed roughly 7% in the same window. That is not coincidence, that is front-running.

The rally started after Foundry telegraphed the new pool in early March. Traders connected the dots: if the biggest pool operator in Bitcoin is turning on Zcash infrastructure, institutional hashrate is coming, and that hashrate needs coins to buy, hold, or receive as mining rewards. Price followed.

The technical case for Zcash over rivals like Monero is something bankers actually care about. Both use cryptography to hide transaction details, but Zcash uses a technique called zero-knowledge proofs that lets one party confirm a transaction is valid without revealing the addresses or amounts involved. Critically, Zcash also supports selective disclosure. A regulated institution can keep its client flows private from the public blockchain while still handing specific records to auditors, regulators, or counterparties when required. Monero, by design, does not offer that door. For a compliance officer, that distinction is the difference between a usable asset and a non-starter.

• Market cap: approximately $6.3 billion, ranked around 15th among all cryptocurrencies
• 30-day performance: up over 75%, versus 7% for the broader market
• Privacy method: zero-knowledge proofs with optional selective disclosure
• Consensus: proof-of-work, same family as Bitcoin
• Launched: 2016 by developer Zooko Wilcox

The Mining Pool Economics Behind the Move

Foundry does not actually mine Bitcoin or Zcash directly. It runs the pool, which is the financial plumbing. Independent miners and public companies plug their rigs into Foundry's infrastructure, combine their hashrate, and split the rewards proportionally. The payoff for miners is predictability. Solo mining turns the block reward into a lottery. Pool mining turns it into something closer to a steady paycheck.

That steady paycheck is exactly what a public mining company needs to show shareholders. And it is exactly what institutional allocators want to see before they green-light a capital commitment into a new chain. By extending the same operational playbook from Bitcoin to Zcash, Foundry is essentially telling institutions they can earn ZEC with the same reporting standards, the same financial rails, and the same compliance hand-holding they already get on BTC.

Foundry's other role, and the one that probably matters more in the long run, is procurement. The company helps U.S. miners source the latest generation of mining rigs, the specialized machines that become economically dead within 18 to 24 months if you miss a refresh cycle. Most of that hardware is still manufactured in Asia, and the Trump administration's tariff regime has made landing costs a moving target. Colyer said Foundry and its clients have been able to work around the disruptions, a carefully worded way of saying nobody has capitulated yet.

How Foundry Became the U.S. Answer to Chinese Mining

Foundry is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, the crypto conglomerate founded by Barry Silbert. The company launched in 2019 with a thesis most of the industry laughed at: that Bitcoin mining could be pulled out of China and anchored in North America. A decade of AntPool and BTC.com dominance made the idea look naive.

Then Beijing handed Foundry a gift. In 2021, Chinese authorities banned Bitcoin mining outright. Hashrate fled, equipment went up for sale, and U.S. operators scooped up both the machines and the market share. Foundry's pool grew from a niche offering into the single largest pool on the Bitcoin network. Today it sits about 40% bigger than its nearest competitor.

Colyer talks about the company in almost geopolitical terms. He argues Foundry's growth is not just a commercial win but a strategic one, because the alternative is letting China reclaim dominance of both pool operations and hardware manufacturing. The CEO has said openly that he expects nation-states to become meaningful miners in the years ahead, and he wants the U.S. to be sitting at that table with real hashrate, not watching from the sidelines.

What the Move Signals for Institutional Crypto Allocation

Here is the part most coverage is underselling. The Zcash pool is not really a Zcash story. It is a story about what institutional crypto treasuries look like in 2026. Five years ago the playbook was simple: buy Bitcoin, maybe buy Ethereum, stop there. The 2024 spot ETF approvals cemented that barbell. Now, with billions sitting in digital-asset portfolios and compliance frameworks maturing, the same funds are quietly asking what else they can hold without triggering a board meeting.

Privacy is one of the answers. Not privacy for its own sake, and not privacy as a cypherpunk ideology, but privacy as a business requirement. Financial institutions have always needed to hide client positions from competitors. Putting every trade on a public ledger was never an acceptable default for them, it was a concession they made because the alternatives were unusable. Zcash's selective disclosure model changes that calculus.

Whether ZEC holds its recent gains is a separate question. A 75% monthly rip in a $6 billion market cap coin is the kind of move that attracts both real capital and fast money, and the latter tends to leave first. But the structural piece, the fact that the largest Bitcoin pool operator is now also the largest Zcash pool operator, does not unwind easily. That infrastructure is a moat.

The cynical read is that Foundry saw a beaten-down privacy coin with a strong narrative catalyst and decided to manufacture the catalyst itself. The charitable read is that institutional demand was there first and Foundry built the pipe. Either way, the pipe now exists. That changes the map.