Foundry Launches Zcash Pool to Match Its Bitcoin Dominance

The Foundry Zcash Pool is live -- and it wasted no time making itself felt. Foundry Digital, the company that already runs the world's largest Bitcoin mining operation, officially opened its Zcash pool on Monday with a clutch of institutional clients already aboard. Since the March announcement, the pool has already grabbed around 29% of Zcash's total network hashrate, which is a strikingly fast land grab for a coin that most large miners have historically ignored.

Why Foundry Moved Into Zcash Now

What gap is Foundry trying to fill in the Zcash ecosystem?

The short answer: institutional infrastructure for Zcash has been badly underdeveloped, and the coin's 2025 price surge made that gap impossible to ignore. ZEC was trading around $50 heading into last autumn. By the time the rally peaked, it was touching nearly $700 -- a roughly 14x move inside two months. That kind of swing tends to attract serious mining capital, and serious mining capital tends to follow Foundry.

CEO Mike Colyer framed the move as a responsibility play, not just a revenue one. The Foundry Zcash Pool already counts multiple institutional mining customers, the company said, without disclosing names. Foundry has a long track record of pulling enterprise clients into mining operations that smaller pools cannot serve -- custody integration, compliance support, SLA guarantees. That same playbook is now coming to ZEC.

Zcash was built on zero-knowledge proof technology and launched back in 2016 with a specific goal: verifiable financial privacy on a public blockchain. The privacy angle has been controversial -- regulators in several jurisdictions have flagged it -- but for a segment of institutional holders and miners, that property is exactly the point.

The launch of Foundry Zcash Pool reflects years of building infrastructure that institutions trust and a responsibility we're committed to living up to in the Zcash ecosystem. Zcash offers something genuinely important to the digital asset ecosystem: verifiable financial privacy on a transparent blockchain.

ZEC's Price and What the Miners Are Really Betting On

How has Zcash performed recently and where could it go?

Right now, Zcash ZEC is on a serious run. The coin is up 73% over the last 30 days, sitting around $354 at the time of Foundry's announcement, and it posted a 42% gain inside a single week. That kind of price action makes mining economics look very different from a year ago, when ZEC was stuck in the mid-double digits and most institutional miners had no reason to touch it.

For context: Foundry's Bitcoin pool commands roughly 29% of total Bitcoin network hashrate, according to Foundry USA Pool data from Hashrate Index. That makes it the single largest Bitcoin mining pool on the planet. The fact that the new Zcash pool has already reached a near-identical share of ZEC hashrate -- in the space of weeks, not years -- tells you something about the scale of institutional interest Foundry is capable of mobilizing when it decides to move into a new chain.

Alongside the pool, Foundry rolled out Zcashinfo.com, a new block explorer purpose-built for Zcash. Users can look up transactions, view mining pool statistics, and track broader ecosystem metrics. It's a utility play as much as a marketing one -- a block explorer gives miners, developers, and holders a native tool they can point clients to, rather than relying on generic third-party infrastructure.

Zooko Wilcox, Zcash's founder and now chief product officer at Shielded Labs, called the arrival of Foundry a meaningful step up for the network. He flagged both the pool and the block explorer as genuine additions to what has historically been a thin infrastructure stack for ZEC.

I'm happy that Foundry is bringing their institutional credibility and long-term commitment to Zcash. Their mining pool and their Zcashinfo.com explorer are valuable additions to Zcash's infrastructure.

Does the Market Believe the ZEC Rally Continues?

Not everyone is convinced the momentum holds. Traders on Myriad, a prediction market platform, put only a 23% probability on ZEC reaching $420 at any point in April -- down sharply from 63% odds that same market assigned just a few days earlier on Friday. That's a notable flip in sentiment. The crowd is pricing in mean reversion faster than most bullish headlines would suggest.

That bearish tilt isn't necessarily wrong. ZEC dropped hard alongside Bitcoin and the broader market in the months before its recent recovery. The privacy coin category has been one of the more volatile corners of crypto for years, and the regulatory overhang on privacy-preserving assets has not disappeared. Foundry's entry brings credibility and hashrate, but it doesn't change the macro regime ZEC is operating in.

Still, the mining pool itself represents a structural bet on ZEC's long-term relevance. Foundry doesn't build institutional-grade infrastructure for coins it thinks will fade. The company built its Bitcoin pool into the world's largest over years of patient capital allocation. Moving the same model to Zcash is a statement about where the firm thinks privacy coin infrastructure is headed -- whether or not traders on prediction markets agree with them this month.