A well-known Bitcoin mining pool, Foundry Digital, operator of Foundry USA Pool, made headlines for the launch of Foundry Zcash Pool.
Interestingly, mining customers were on board even before the launch, showing enthusiasm. Furthermore, with March 11 as the initial launch date, the hashrate increased to 30% of the current hashrate of the Zcash network.
The press release noted the magnitude of growth in just a few days:
The pace of adoption of Foundry Zcash Pool makes it clear that institutional and public miners are looking for a compatible, purpose-built Zcash mining solution.
The company also contacted X and emphasized:
Institutional miners are looking for compliant, purpose-built $ZEC infrastructure, and we are proud to deliver it.
Pros and Cons of Foundry Zcash Pool
As part of the plan, the Zcash Pool foundry will be operated of the US to minimize compliance and “counterparty risk to regulated institutional and public miners.”
With “transparent and auditable payouts,” the Pool will also provide additional benefits to miners. However, it is important to note that this move would also undermine the decentralized ethos in the mining sector.
This also raises a question about potential long-term regulatory compliance. Therefore, a deeper analysis suggests that this move by Foundry Zcash Pool is a double-edged sword.
Miner revenue, hash price and hashrate analyzes paint a worrying picture
This was crucial given the timing, as the miner’s daily revenue fell sharply from $45 million in early 2026 to $28-$35 million at the time of writing.
On the other hand, the hashrate also saw very volatile spikes, eventually reaching 1.2 billion EH/s, indicating that miners were earning less despite increased competition.
This sentiment is confirmed by another chart of Bitcoin [BTC] hashprice suggests that since January 2026 to date, although the price of Bitcoin has seen some signs of recovery, the hash price, which is the unit profit of miners, has fallen sharply.
This in turn has resulted in a 30% decline in miner profitability, which is well below the long-term average of $0.046 per TH/s/day over the past year.
Zcashinfo.com also comes into the spotlight
In addition to the pool launch, Foundry also announced the launch of Zcashinfo.com, “a new block explorer built for the Zcash community.” The latter was built to provide miners with a one-stop shop for “real-time pool rankings, hashrate distribution, block data, network difficulty trends,” etc.
Zooko Wilcox, founder of Zcash, welcomed the move, adding:
I’m pleased that Foundry is bringing their institutional credibility and long-term commitment to Zcash.
$ZEC price action
This coincided with ZEC trading at $376.11 at the time of publication, having risen 4.38% in the last 24 hours.
The aforementioned price action follows ZEC struggling to break the $250 resistance level since the last week of February.
However, given the bullish price action at the time of reporting, the chances of ZEC reaching $400 seem high.
Final summary
- The launch of Foundry Zcash Pool comes at a time when overall miner profitability has fallen by 30%.
- In addition to the pool, Zcashinfo.com provides access to all data on the chain in one place, making things seamless for miners.