Foundry Moves Into Zcash: New Mining Pool Seizes 29% Hashrate and Unveils Zcashinfo Explorer

Foundry Digital is extending its footprint beyond Bitcoin. The operator of the world’s largest BTC mining pool has gone live with a Zcash (ZEC) mining pool, onboarding multiple institutional miners at launch and quickly securing roughly 29% of the network’s hashrate since announcing the initiative in March, according to on-chain data. The company also introduced Zcashinfo.com, a dedicated block explorer for the Zcash chain featuring transaction lookups and mining pool statistics.

The timing is calculated. Foundry USA Pool already accounts for about 29% of Bitcoin production among mining pools (Hashrate Index), and now the firm has reached a similar share on Zcash. Pairing a pool with a purpose-built explorer gives miners and market participants a cleaner telemetry layer for a network that often suffers from tooling gaps.

Here’s the piece that matters: a regulated, institution-focused operator bringing scale to a privacy coin tests the balance between credible neutrality and compliance pressure. Zcash, launched in 2016 on zero-knowledge proof technology to enable verifiable financial privacy on a transparent blockchain, has long attracted cryptographers and mission-driven users but has struggled to standardize enterprise-grade infrastructure. Foundry’s CEO, Mike Colyer, framed the rollout as closing an infrastructure gap and emphasized that institutions trust the stack the firm has spent years building—while underscoring that Zcash’s privacy properties serve a legitimate need in digital finance. Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox welcomed the move, describing Foundry’s institutional credibility and the new explorer as valuable additions to the ecosystem.

There’s opportunity and risk in the same breath. On one hand, institutional hash can stabilize payouts, reduce orphan risk, and professionalize operations—a magnet for larger miners who prefer predictable uptime and transparent fee policies. The new explorer tightens the feedback loop, making mining pool concentration and network health more observable. On the other hand, rapid accumulation of ~29% hashrate by a single pool—especially one that already commands a similar share on Bitcoin—raises the usual decentralization and policy concerns. If a large, U.S.-based pool sets conservative template or compliance rules under regulatory pressure, miners chasing steady revenue might default to those norms by inertia. That’s how cultural defaults form in proof-of-work, and it can be difficult to unwind.

Market reflexivity is at work, too. ZEC rallied sharply last fall—from roughly $50 to nearly $700 in about two months—before retracing with Bitcoin and other majors. More recently, momentum has returned: over the past month ZEC is up 73% to about $354, including nearly 42% in the last week. Yet traders on Myriad, a prediction market operated by Dastan, have turned cautious on near-term upside; the market currently assigns about a 23% chance that ZEC tags $420 in April, down from 63% last Friday. That divergence—the infrastructure “upgrade” narrative versus softening short-term odds—often appears when sophisticated participants fade crowded momentum.

Strategically, Foundry is building a familiar stack: core protocol services (mining pool) plus data infrastructure (block explorer). That pairing creates a defensible moat with aligned incentives—better data improves operational decisions, which attracts more hashrate, which yields more data. For Zcash, the immediate win is reliability. The open question is governance: clear public disclosure around block template policies, transaction selection, and any filtering heuristics will signal whether scale is arriving without compromising the network’s foundational values.

Watch three indicators from here: - Pool share drift: does Foundry’s ZEC share climb past 30% or does competition rebalance it? - Policy transparency: documented stances on transaction inclusion and censorship resistance. - Miner behavior: do independent operators and non-U.S. pools gain or lose relative share?

If those trend constructively, institutional entry could harden Zcash’s economic security while preserving its privacy guarantees. If not, the community may need to nudge incentives back toward broader distribution—before defaults ossify.