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 said 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.

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