Foundry Digital has captured approximately 29% of Zcash's total network hashrate within a single month of its mining pool going public, rapidly consolidating power in a market where rival ViaBTC took far longer to establish similar dominance. The institutional-focused pool, announced in March 2026 and launched publicly in April, immediately secured a share nearly equal to ViaBTC's prior leading position, signaling a seismic shift in the Zcash mining landscape.

What Does 29% Hashrate Capture in One Month Actually Mean for Zcash Network Security?

A single pool controlling 29% of a PoW network’s hashrate is not inherently dangerous, but it concentrates block production risk in ways that demand monitoring.

At 29%, Foundry cannot unilaterally execute a 51% attack, but it is close enough to the threshold that any further organic growth changes that calculus.

The fact that ViaBTC was already sitting at ~30% before Foundry launched means the network now has two pools each holding roughly three-tenths of total hashrate. That’s a different concentration structure than existed six months ago.

 Foundry Zcash Pool is officially live! Since our announcement last month, we've seen rapid hashrate growth reaching ~30% of network hashrate. Institutional miners have been looking for compliant, purpose-built $ZEC infrastructure, and we're proud to deliver it.

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Foundry CEO Mike Colyer framed the launch as an infrastructure gap play: Zcash has “matured into an institutional-grade asset, but the mining infrastructure supporting it hasn’t kept pace.”

The data supports the premise that Zcash’s hashrate growth from 8.1 GSol/s to 13.8 GSol/s since September 2025 reflects expanding miner interest that the existing pool infrastructure wasn’t built to absorb at an institutional scale.

What Foundry has built operationally is notable for its compliance architecture. The pool’s PPLNS payout model, mandatory KYC/AML checks, SOC 1 and SOC 2 audit equivalency, and 24/7 U.S.-based support aren’t features designed for hobbyist miners.

Foundry’s $ZEC mining pool is live today as one of the largest Zcash pools by hashrate, with multiple institutional customers already actively mining. The financial privacy ecosystem is growing. https://t.co/d39CYMltI6

No minimum hashrate requirement means the access floor is low, but the compliance overhead signals this is targeting miners who need defensible regulatory positioning, the same institutional cohort driving volume on Foundry USA Pool in Bitcoin.

Zooko Wilcox, Zcash founder and now Chief Product Officer at Shielded Labs, directly addressed the centralization angle: “This will spread out the Zcash mining hashpower from its current concentration in a single pool, and hopefully it will bring in new Zcash miners who trust Foundry to operate a high-quality service.”

That framing treats Foundry’s entry as a decentralization event relative to ViaBTC’s prior dominance. Whether it remains that depends on where Foundry’s share stabilizes. If it climbs past 35%, the narrative flips.

The data shows rapid institutional onboarding. That implies pre-existing demand from miners who were waiting for a compliant U.S.-based option, not that Foundry manufactured the hashrate from scratch.