Foundry Brings Its Bitcoin Mojo to Zcash, Quietly Snagging 29% of the Privacy Coin's Hasrate

Foundry Digital—the operator behind the world's largest Bitcoin mining pool—just expanded its horizons to the privacy coin realm. Because apparently dominating one blockchain wasn't enough to satisfy their appetite for hashrate domination.

The company officially launched its Foundry Zcash Pool on Monday, with multiple institutional mining customers already on board. Since its March announcement, the pool has captured roughly 29% of Zcash's hashrate, per on-chain data. Not bad for a first act. That's basically the crypto equivalent of showing up to a high school dance and immediately stealing the prom queen.

"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," said Foundry CEO Mike Colyer. "Zcash offers something genuinely important to the digital asset ecosystem: verifiable financial privacy on a transparent blockchain." Nothing says "transparent" quite like a blockchain specifically designed to hide everything. But we digress.

Alongside the mining pool, Foundry unveiled Zcashinfo.com—a block explorer tailored for Zcash, letting users look up transactions and track ecosystem data, including mining pool stats. Because what's more fun than watching your privacy coin transactions? Watching them with extra charts.

"I'm happy that Foundry is bringing their institutional credibility and long-term commitment to Zcash," said Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox, chief product officer at Shielded Labs. "Their mining pool and Zcashinfo.com explorer are valuable additions to Zcash's infrastructure." Coming from the man who brought you "Zcash: it's like Bitcoin but with a curtain," this is high praise.

The timing isn't exactly random. Zcash has been on a tear lately. The privacy-focused coin launched in 2016 using zero-knowledge proof technology, and traders are now feeling bullish again after ZEC surged roughly 62% in the last week alone. ZEC was changing hands around $379.89 on Friday—up 15% in 24 hours, 62% in the last week, and more than 77% over the past month. Nothing says "legitimate financial instrument" quite like a 62% weekly gain. But hey, we're not here to judge.

That momentum has shifted prediction market odds. Traders on Myriad currently see a 60% chance of Zcash hitting $420 in April—a further 10% move up—down from earlier optimism. Because nothing captures the essence of rational market analysis quite like betting on whether a privacy coin will hit a specific price point in a specific month. Classic degen behavior, and we mean that with love.