Bitcoin mining giant Foundry prepares institutional Zcash pool for 2026 launch

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The largest Bitcoin mining pool by hashrate is getting ready to expand its footprint beyond BTC by rolling out an institutional-grade mining pool for privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash (ZEC). The move brings one of the most established industrial players in proof-of-work mining into a network that, until now, has largely relied on smaller, globally distributed pools.

Foundry Digital, the crypto infrastructure firm behind Foundry USA Pool, plans to launch its dedicated Zcash mining service in April 2026. The new offering is tailored to listed companies and other institutional miners that need robust compliance frameworks, auditable payouts and standardized reporting, but who also want exposure to a privacy-oriented asset.

Foundry’s institutional pivot into Zcash

Foundry Digital is widely known for operating Foundry USA Pool, one of the world’s top Bitcoin mining pools by share of global hashrate. By extending its infrastructure to Zcash, the company is effectively adding a second major proof-of-work network to its product line, without abandoning its core focus on BTC.

According to statements shared with industry media, the new Zcash pool will be headquartered in the United States and will leverage the same operational backbone already used for Foundry’s Bitcoin pool. That includes compliance-focused processes, standardized operating procedures and controls designed for public corporations and large-scale mining operators.

Chief executive Mike Colyer has argued that Zcash has matured into an institutional-grade asset, while the mining infrastructure around it has not kept pace. For years, the bulk of ZEC’s hashrate has flowed through relatively small or offshore pools that often lack the kind of governance, auditing and legal clarity that institutional miners typically require.

From Foundry’s perspective, that mismatch represents a clear opening. The firm says many publicly listed and institutional miners interested in ZEC have not had a compliant, U.S.-based, purpose-built platform through which to secure the network, even as Zcash’s profile in the broader market has grown.

Colyer has also downplayed the idea that the shift is merely a response to squeezed Bitcoin margins after the 2024 halving. Instead, he frames the initiative as part of a broader strategy to deploy “institutional infrastructure where it’s missing,” while still treating Bitcoin mining as Foundry’s foundational business.

Bridging privacy, regulation and institutional demand

The timing of Foundry’s move lines up with a fresh wave of interest in privacy-centric cryptocurrencies. New tax reporting rules for digital assets in major jurisdictions, combined with more sophisticated on-chain analytics, have pushed questions about financial privacy back into the spotlight for both individuals and institutions.

Within that landscape, Zcash stands alongside projects like Monero (XMR) and Dash (DASH). Over the past year, ZEC has significantly outperformed many of its peers: data cited in industry reports point to a rally of more than 600-670% in the last 12 months, far outstripping gains in XMR and DASH over the same period.

Analysts often credit this performance to Zcash’s hybrid privacy model. On ZEC, fully shielded, anonymous transactions are optional, coexisting with transparent transfers and selective disclosure features. In practice, that means exchanges, custodians and corporate treasuries can keep certain flows visible for compliance and accounting purposes, without eliminating the possibility of privacy for other use cases.

This design has helped Zcash gain traction among more sophisticated market participants. The asset has seen accumulation from a Winklevoss-backed treasury firm and inclusion in products such as the Grayscale Zcash Trust, reinforcing the narrative that ZEC is no longer just a niche privacy coin but an instrument that institutional players actively monitor.

Foundry has echoed this angle publicly. A company spokesperson explained that Zcash addresses what they view as a core principle: financial privacy as an element of economic freedom, and the belief that privacy and regulatory compliance are not mutually exclusive. By offering a fully compliant, KYC-enabled pool, the firm hopes to channel new institutional hashrate into a network defined by optional anonymity.

Zcash’s mining landscape and the role of large pools

Launched in 2016, Zcash is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency based on zero-knowledge proofs. Technically, the protocol builds on Bitcoin’s codebase but integrates zk-SNARKs, a class of cryptography that allows nodes to verify that a transaction is valid without revealing sender, recipient or amount on the public ledger.

Just like Bitcoin, Zcash relies on proof-of-work mining to secure its blockchain. Miners deploy specialized hardware to solve resource-intensive cryptographic puzzles. When a puzzle is solved, a new block of transactions is appended to the chain, and the successful miner or pool receives freshly issued ZEC plus transaction fees.

Zcash blocks are generated roughly every 75 seconds, considerably faster than Bitcoin’s 10-minute block interval. Despite this difference in timing, both networks share a hard cap of 21 million coins, anchoring their monetary policy in a fixed-supply model familiar to BTC miners and investors.

The network uses the Equihash mining algorithm, which was originally designed to be memory-intensive and to resist some of the early ASIC concentration seen in SHA-256 mining. Over time, however, specialized hardware has still emerged, and today Zcash mining is very much a professionalized, industrial activity.

Because network difficulty scales with total hashrate, the odds of a solo miner finding a block on their own are extremely low. To smooth income and improve predictability, miners typically join pools that aggregate computational power and distribute rewards according to each participant’s share of the work.

Current data from pool-tracking services suggest that the Zcash hashrate remains concentrated among a handful of large pools. ViaBTC has been reported controlling around one-third of the network’s hash power, with F2Pool holding a mid-teens percentage and the rest split among operators like 2Miners and Antpool. This degree of concentration has raised recurring questions about decentralization and resilience.

Industry figures, including Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox, have argued that introducing a major, compliance-oriented pool like Foundry’s could help diversify the ecosystem. By attracting new institutional miners—especially those already active in regulated markets such as North America—the new service may redistribute hashrate away from a small cluster of incumbents.

Inside Foundry’s Zcash pool: compliance, payouts and operations

Foundry’s upcoming Zcash pool is being marketed squarely at miners that operate under formal governance and regulatory regimes. To that end, participation will involve rigorous identity verification and adherence to anti-money laundering standards typically associated with traditional finance.

The company has confirmed that the pool will integrate know-your-customer (KYC) checks and anti-money laundering (AML) screening for participants. In parallel, it will provide transparency around reward calculations, detailed reporting tools tailored to institutional workflows and a dedicated support team based in the United States.

Operationally, the service is expected to reuse the framework established for Foundry USA’s Bitcoin pool. That infrastructure has undergone SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance audits, a signal intended to reassure corporate clients who require consistent, auditable internal controls before committing large amounts of capital and hardware.

One notable design choice is that mining rewards will be paid out to transparent Zcash addresses rather than shielded ones. While ZEC’s privacy capabilities remain available on-chain, directing pool payouts through transparent Zcash addresses aligns better with the reconciliation, supervision and accounting requirements that listed firms and regulated entities must follow.

In terms of economics, Foundry plans to use a Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS) model to distribute rewards. According to Colyer, this approach is fully auditable and generates granular datasets that make it easier for organizations to perform daily payment reconciliations and internal checks on earnings and performance.

The exact pool fee structure has not yet been disclosed. Foundry has only indicated that it intends to offer competitive commission rates compared with existing Zcash pools. There will be no minimum hashrate threshold required to join, a detail that leaves the door open for both large industrial miners and smaller participants who want access to institutional-grade infrastructure.

Market context: mining economics, volatility and governance

The strategic expansion into Zcash comes at a time when Bitcoin mining economics have tightened. Following the 2024 halving, block subsidies were cut in half, even as network difficulty climbed and BTC’s price retraced from highs near $125,000 to under $70,000.

This shift has pushed the hashprice metric—expected revenue per unit of hashpower—down sharply, sliding from over $60 to around $30 per petahash per day in some estimates. Unsurprisingly, many large miners have started exploring other proof-of-work networks as a way to diversify revenue and mitigate the impact of lower BTC-denominated rewards.

Foundry insists that its Zcash move is not simply a margin play, but it does take place against this broader backdrop of miners rebalancing across multiple chains. For operators already familiar with Foundry’s processes on Bitcoin, plugging into a sister pool dedicated to ZEC may represent a relatively straightforward extension of their existing deployments.

On the asset side, Zcash itself has been through a highly volatile period. Over the last year or so, ZEC’s price climbed from under $35-$50 to peaks near $700, before correcting sharply and trading closer to the low- to mid-$200 range at various points in early 2026. Such swings underline both the speculative interest around privacy coins and the risks that institutional participants must weigh.

At the same time, the project’s governance ecosystem has faced its own turbulence. In early 2026, a group of developers previously associated with Electric Coin Company—the original protocol steward—raised more than $25 million to continue work on a new privacy-first Zcash wallet, shortly after the ECC team resigned amid internal governance disputes with its nonprofit parent entity.

Despite these challenges, commentators such as Barry Silbert, founder of Digital Currency Group (Foundry’s parent company), have suggested that a meaningful share of Bitcoin’s market value could ultimately migrate into privacy-focused assets like Zcash over the long term. His public comments have floated ranges of 5-10% of BTC’s market capitalization as a possible ceiling, though such projections remain speculative.

Elsewhere in the industry, prominent voices including Arthur Hayes, Naval Ravikant and Mert Mumtaz have discussed Zcash and its role within the broader privacy-coin narrative, further fueling debate around the project’s potential and long-term positioning.

What Foundry’s entry could mean for Zcash’s network

If launched as planned in April 2026, Foundry’s Zcash pool would rank among the largest institutional-grade mining offerings ever introduced to the ZEC ecosystem. That alone could shift the balance of power among existing pools and inject a new wave of hashrate from miners who were previously unwilling or unable to participate.

From a network security perspective, additional, geographically distinct pools can enhance resilience by reducing the concentration of block production in just a few hands. If Foundry succeeds in onboarding large public miners from North America and other regulated markets, the distribution of hashrate across jurisdictions and entities could become more diverse.

However, the arrival of a heavyweight Bitcoin mining operator in a comparatively smaller network also raises familiar concerns about centralization. Some community members may worry that a single, well-capitalized pool could eventually command outsized influence over block production, even if its stated goal is to support decentralization through competition.

For miners, the new pool presents a trade-off between regulatory clarity and privacy expectations. While Zcash itself retains optional shielded transactions, participants in Foundry’s pool must navigate KYC and AML screening and accept transparent payout addresses. For institutions, that compromise is often a prerequisite; for privacy purists, it may be less appealing.

In practical terms, Foundry’s step into Zcash signals that privacy-oriented networks are beginning to intersect more directly with institutional capital and traditional compliance frameworks. Whether that blend of anonymity tools and regulatory oversight becomes a standard model, or remains a niche offering, will depend on how miners, regulators and users respond over the next few years.

As the launch window approaches, Zcash’s mining ecosystem stands at an inflection point: a dominant Bitcoin pool is preparing to plug into a network built around financial privacy, offering a mix of industrial-scale infrastructure, strict compliance and optional on-chain anonymity that could reshape how institutional miners approach proof-of-work beyond Bitcoin.