The world’s top Bitcoin mining pool operator expands into privacy coins as ZEC surges 600% year-over-year.
Foundry Digital, the Digital Currency Group (DCG) subsidiary behind the world’s largest Bitcoin mining pool by hashrate, announced today that it will launch an institution-focused Zcash mining pool in April.
The move marks Foundry’s first expansion beyond Bitcoin and targets what the company describes as a gap in the Zcash ecosystem: the absence of compliant, institutional-grade pool infrastructure capable of meeting the needs of public companies and large-scale miners.
Foundry CEO Mike Colyer framed the expansion as a natural extension of the company’s mission, noting that while Zcash has grown into a serious institutional asset, its mining infrastructure has lagged behind. The new pool will be U.S.-based and built on the same compliance framework underpinning Foundry USA Pool, which holds both SOC 1 Type 2 and SOC 2 Type 2 certifications.
The announcement was welcomed by Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox, now Chief Product Officer at Shielded Labs, who said the new pool should help distribute Zcash mining hashpower away from its current concentration in a single pool and attract new miners.
ZEC is trading around $212, down roughly 4% in the past 24 hours and about 10% on the week.
Zcash Open Development Lab (ZODL), formed by the core developers of Zcash (ZEC) after they exited Electric Coin Capital, recently secured $25 million in seed funding to support the privacy-focused ecosystem.
Zcash, launched in 2016, uses zero-knowledge proof technology to enable private transactions on a public blockchain, allowing verification without exposing wallet addresses or amounts.
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