Top Bitcoin Mining Pool Operator Foundry Is Getting Into Zcash
TL;DR
Foundry Digital, operator of Bitcoin's largest mining pool, will launch a Zcash mining pool next month targeting institutional investors. The move addresses infrastructure gaps for financial institutions while leveraging Foundry's U.S.-based compliance advantages.
Key Takeaways
- •Foundry Digital will launch a Zcash mining pool in October 2024 targeting publicly traded companies and financial institutions lacking mining infrastructure.
- •The expansion is driven by market opportunity rather than Bitcoin profitability concerns, with Foundry emphasizing its strong Bitcoin mining foundation remains intact.
- •Zcash's proof-of-work mechanism requires specialized hardware incompatible with Bitcoin mining, despite both using PoW consensus.
- •Foundry's U.S.-based operations aim to mitigate compliance risks compared to China-based mining pools dominating the current market.
- •Zcash's network hashrate has surged over 70% since September 2024, indicating growing mining activity around the privacy-focused cryptocurrency.
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Foundry Digital said on Wednesday that it plans to offer a mining pool for Zcash next month, enabling people to earn the privacy-focused cryptocurrency using shared resources.
The move is aimed at publicly traded companies and financial institutions, which lack the necessary infrastructure to participate in the process of validating Zcash transactions, the operator of Bitcoin’s leading mining pool said in a press release.
In a statement, Foundry CEO Mike Colyer said that Zcash has “matured into an institutional-grade asset” since it debuted nearly a decade ago, while arguing that the digital asset is playing a “critical role in advancing financial privacy.”
The firm said the arrangement will share similarities with “Foundry USA,” a mining pool that underpins around 31% of Bitcoin’s total hashrate, according to Hashrate Index. Over the past month, it has mined around 4,150 Bitcoin, a sum currently worth $290 million.
Foundry’s Zcash pool is meant to mitigate compliance and counterparty risks with operations based in the U.S., the firm said. Among the world’s leading mining pools, three are operated out of China, where activity remains robust despite recent government crackdowns.
A Foundry spokesperson told Decrypt that the firm’s expansion is not based on how profitable Bitcoin mining currently is. Amid rising energy costs, an increasing number of Bitcoin mining firms have pivoted toward opportunities associated with AI data centers.
“Foundry's Bitcoin mining business is strong and remains our core foundation,” they added. “The decision to expand into Zcash was informed by the real gap in the market we identified and are uniquely positioned to fill.”
What’s more, Foundry said the Zcash pool will come with round-the-clock tech support for participants, alongside reporting tools for payouts that make them auditable.
Zcash changed hands around $215 on Wednesday, a 4.5% decrease over the past day, according to CoinGecko. Its price has surged more than 600% over the past year.
Mining pools combine the computing power of individual miners to solve blocks together, sharing rewards proportionally to ensure more frequent and stable payouts. Aside from Foundry USA, Ocean and Luxor are among the leading operators of pools based in the U.S.
Similar to Bitcoin, Zcash uses a proof-of-work consensus mechanism. That means new Zcash is earned by power-hungry machines that constantly crunch complex calculations—roughly every 75 seconds, in this case—while securing the network by attesting to the validity of transactions.
Zcash miners measure the power of their rigs in “Gigasols per second,” or GSol/s. Essentially, the metric represents the number of potential solutions miners can find for Zcash’s next block. Since the start of September, Zcash’s hash rate has jumped to 13.8 GSol/s from 8.1 GSol/s, indicating that more resources are being thrown at the network.
Despite the networks’ similarities, the Foundry spokesperson said that Zcash and Bitcoin use “fundamentally different proof-of-work algorithms, and therefore the hardware is not interchangeable.”
The leading Zcash mining pool, operated by ViaBTC, commands 30% of Zcash’s hashrate, according to PoolBay. But Foundry has signaled that could change fairly soon.