Foundry Just Dropped a Zcash Pool and a Block Explorer—And Already Controls 30% of the Hasrate

Foundry Digital, the biggest Bitcoin mining pool in the game, quietly rolled out a Zcash mining operation and has already locked down roughly 30% of the network's hashrate, per company data and its freshly minted block explorer. The New York crew says institutional miners hopped on board before the public launch, following an initial teaser back in March.

Riding alongside the pool, Foundry dropped Zcashinfo.com—a block explorer showing pool rankings, hashrate distribution, block data, and mining difficulty in real time.

Zcash, which went live in 2016, lets users transact on a public blockchain while keeping the nitty-gritty private via zero-knowledge proof tech. The network can validate a transaction without spilling the sender, receiver, or amount—using cryptographic wizardry called zk-SNARKs. Like Bitcoin, Zcash runs on proof-of-work mining, where machines crunch cryptographic puzzles to earn fresh ZEC tokens plus transaction fees. Blocks drop roughly every 75 seconds, compared to Bitcoin's leisurely 10-minute cadence—but both cap out at 21 million coins. Zcash uses the Equihash algorithm, which is memory-hungry in a way SHA-256 simply isn't.

Solo mining is a rough grind, so miners team up in pools to combine hashrate and split rewards. That makes large pools pretty influential in how the network performs. Foundry's pool doles out rewards through transparent addresses and uses a pay-per-last-N-shares (PPLNS) model, tracking contributions over time to calculate fair payouts. The pool is open to new institutional participants, with onboarding aimed squarely at regulated entities.