Bitcoin mining giant Foundry adds new pool for privacy-focused Zcash

Foundry, an upstate New York–based firm that launched in 2019, runs a mining pool that today commands around 31% of all Bitcoin production. On Monday, the company formally launched a second pool operation based around a cryptocurrency known as Zcash that shares many attributes of Bitcoin, but that is designed to be less visible. The move amounts to a major endorsement for Zcash in light of Foundry’s outsize role in the crypto-mining space.

In an interview with *Fortune,* Foundry CEO Mike Colyer says the decision to add Zcash to its operations comes in response to growing interest in so-called privacy coins from large institutions. By launching the new pool, Foundry is betting that institutional miners, which include several public companies, will allocate part of their resources to producing Zcash. This in turn reflects a view by some crypto analysts that large financial organizations, which have amassed digital assets portfolios worth billions of dollars, will embrace Zcash, whose network excels at keeping transactions private.

The first part of the bet already appears to be working. Foundry, which is a subsidiary of billionaire Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group, said in a statement that its new Zcash pool has seen rapid and sustained growth from multiple institutional mining customers, and that the pool already accounts for nearly a third of new Zcash production.

Zcash is currently around the 15th biggest cryptocurrency, with a market cap of approximately $6.3 billion, which is tiny compared with Bitcoin’s $1.5 trillion market cap or the $270 billion of second place Ethereum, but still significant. Notably, the price of Zcash has jumped over 75% in the past 30 days compared with a rise of around 7% in the overall crypto market. The rapid price increase came after Foundry announced the pending launch of the new pool in early March.

Zcash launched in 2016 and is the brainchild of a developer named Zooko Wilcox, who sought to build a Bitcoin-like network that made it easier to conceal transactions. The Zcash blockchain can do this thanks to a technology known as zero-knowledge proofs that allows a user to verify a transaction is true without seeing identifying details. And unlike privacy coin rival Monero, Zcash’s architecture allows for selective disclosure, which makes it more appealing to banks and other large institutions that seek to safeguard client transactions while also complying with regulatory demands.

Like Bitcoin, Zcash also relies on a so-called proof-of-work network. The term describes a blockchain system that requires participants to show they have skin in the game by expending electricity in order to contribute to the network and receive a reward. This contrasts with blockchains like Ethereum and Solana that require network validators lock up collateral, a system known as proof-of-stake.