Top Bitcoin Mining Pool Operator Foundry Is Getting Into Zcash

Foundry Digital said Wednesday it plans to offer a mining pool Zcash next month, allowing people to earn the privacy-focused cryptocurrency using shared resources.

The move is aimed at listed companies and financial institutions, which do not have the necessary infrastructure to participate in the process of validating Zcash transactions, the operator of Bitcoin’s leading mining pool said in a press release.

In a statement, Foundry CEO Mike Colyer said Zcash has “evolved into an institutional-quality asset” since it debuted nearly a decade ago, while arguing that the digital asset plays a “critical role in advancing financial privacy.”

The company said the deal will share similarities with “Foundry USA,” a mining pool that supports about 31% of Bitcoin’s total hashrate, the company said. Hashrate index. Over the past month, it has mined approximately 4,150 Bitcoin, an amount currently worth $290 million.

Foundry’s Zcash pool is intended to mitigate compliance and counterparty risks in U.S. operations, the company said. Of the largest mining pools in the world, three are operated from China, where the activity takes place remains robust Despite recent government repression.

This is what a Foundry spokesperson said Declutter that the company’s expansion is not based on how profitable Bitcoin mining currently is. Amid rising energy costs, An increasing number of Bitcoin mining companies have focused on opportunities related to AI data centers.

“Foundry’s Bitcoin mining business is strong and remains our core foundation,” she added. “The decision to expand into Zcash was driven by the real gap in the market that we have identified and are uniquely positioned to fill.”

Additionally, Foundry said the Zcash pool will provide 24-hour technical support for participants, in addition to payout reporting tools that make them auditable.

Zcash changed hands for around $215 on Wednesday, down 4.5% from the previous day Coin gecko. The price has increased by more than 600% in the past year.

Mining pools combine the computing power of individual miners to solve blocks together, with rewards shared proportionally to ensure more frequent and stable payouts. In addition to Foundry USA, Ocean and Luxor are among the leading pool operators in the US

Like Bitcoin, Zcash uses a proof-of-work consensus mechanism. That means new Zcash is earned by power-hungry machines that continuously perform complex calculations (in this case, about every 75 seconds) while simultaneously securing the network by confirming the validity of transactions.

Zcash miners measure the power of their rigs in “Gigasols per second” or GSol/s. Essentially, the metric represents the number of potential solutions miners can find for Zcash’s next block. Since the beginning of September, Zcash’s hash rate has increased from 8.1 GSol/s to 13.8 GSol/s, indicating that more resources are being thrown at the network.

Despite the similarities between the networks, Foundry’s spokesperson said Zcash and Bitcoin “use fundamentally different proof-of-work algorithms, and therefore the hardware is not interchangeable.”

The leading Zcash mining pool, operated by ViaBTC, features according to Swimming PoolBay. But Foundry has indicated that this could change quite quickly.