Foundry Digital, the largest Bitcoin The company launched a Zcash (ZEC) mining pool that has grown rapidly to control about 30% of the network’s hashrate, according to company data and its newly released block explorer.
The New York-based company said that following its initial announcement in March, multiple institutional miners joined the pool ahead of its public debut.
In addition to the mining pool, Foundry also launched Zcashinfo.com, a block explorer that tracks network activity. The website displays mining pool rankings, computing power distribution, block data and mining difficulty in real time.
Launched in 2016, Zcash allows users to send transactions on a public blockchain while keeping key details private through zero-knowledge proof technology. The network can use a cryptographic method called zk-SNARK to verify that a transaction is valid without revealing the sender, recipient, or amount involved.
The network, like Bitcoin, relies on proof-of-work mining, in which dedicated machines compete to solve cryptographic puzzles in exchange for rewards paid in newly issued ZEC tokens and transaction fees.
Blocks on Zcash are generated approximately every 75 seconds, which is much faster than Bitcoin’s 10-minute cycle, even though both networks have a supply cap of 21 million. Zcash uses the Equihash algorithm, which is designed to require a lot of memory, unlike Bitcoin’s SHA-256 system.
Since the odds of solving a block alone are low, miners often form mining pools to combine computing power and share rewards. This structure makes large pools central to network performance, as they can control a large portion of the total hash rate.
Foundry’s mining pool distributes rewards through transparent addresses and uses a pay-per-last-N-share (PPLNS) model that tracks miners’ contributions over time to calculate payouts.
The pool is open to new institutional participants, with a focus on regulated entities.
