Foundry Digital, currently the largest Bitcoin mining pool by hashrate, recently unveiled a new Zcash (ZEC) mining pool that swiftly captured approximately 30% of the network’s total hashrate. This development is corroborated by company data and its newly launched block explorer.
The New York-based company announced that several institutional miners had joined the pool prior to its official release, building on an initial announcement made in March.
In conjunction with the mining pool, Foundry also introduced Zcashinfo.com, a block explorer tool that provides real-time insights into network activity. This platform displays rankings of mining pools, distribution of hashrate, detailed block information, and mining difficulty metrics.
Introduced in 2016, Zcash offers users the ability to conduct transactions on a public blockchain while maintaining privacy for key transaction details through zero-knowledge proof technology. Using zk-SNARKs—a cryptographic technique—Zcash ensures that transactions are verified as valid without disclosing sensitive information such as the sender’s identity, recipient, or transaction amount.
Similar to Bitcoin, Zcash relies on proof-of-work mining where specialized devices vie to solve cryptographic challenges in return for rewards, which include freshly minted ZEC tokens and transaction fees. The network produces a new block approximately every 75 seconds, significantly faster than Bitcoin’s ten-minute interval, although both have a supply limit of 21 million coins. Unlike Bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm, Zcash employs the Equihash algorithm, designed to necessitate substantial memory use.
Due to the slim chances of solving a block individually, miners often form pools to amalgamate computational resources and distribute rewards. Consequently, large mining pools have become pivotal in network operations by controlling significant shares of total hashrate.
Foundry’s pool employs transparent addresses for reward distribution and adheres to a pay-per-last-N-shares (PPLNS) model, which considers miners’ contributions over time when calculating payouts. The pool welcomes new institutional participants, with onboarding processes emphasizing regulated entities.