Zcash’s Price Revival Turns ZEC Miners Into Crypto’s Top Power Earners

Zcash’s rally has turned one of crypto mining’s sleepier corners into a revenue outlier.

The privacy-focused cryptocurrency, largely sidelined for years after its 2018 boom, has rebounded sharply since September, lifting mining revenue to levels that now exceed Bitcoin mining by more than four times on a power-adjusted basis.

ZEC rose from about $50 in mid-September to more than $670 in mid-November 2025, before sliding below $200 in early March. It then rebounded to around $600 in early May, with CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko showing ZEC recently trading near $570 to $580 and a market capitalization of about $9.5 billion.

The price surge has revived miner interest. Zcash’s network hashrate roughly doubled from about 7 GH/s before the September rally to around 14 GH/s, where it has largely stayed. Minerstat recently showed the network near 14.6 GH/s, while ASIC Miner Value listed Zcash hashrate at about 13.65 GH/s.

Even after that hashrate increase diluted individual miner economics, Zcash mining revenue has risen to about $0.06 per KH/s. That is down from nearly $0.09 per KH/s around November, but still notably rich by crypto-mining standards.

For context, Bitmain’s Antminer Z15 Pro, the leading Zcash ASIC, generates about 0.00938504 BTC equivalent per megawatt-hour, or roughly $769/MWh at a bitcoin price of $81,000. By comparison, Bitcoin mining with the latest-generation S23 Pro generates about 0.00210526 BTC/MWh, or about $170.53/MWh. That makes Zcash mining revenue more than four times higher than Bitcoin mining on the same power basis — and, at least for now, higher than many AI/HPC power monetization benchmarks.

The latest rebound also coincided with Foundry’s move into Zcash. Foundry said in April that its Zcash mining pool had reached about 30% of the network’s hashrate after being announced in March, marking a notable expansion by one of the largest institutional Bitcoin mining infrastructure providers into an alternative proof-of-work network.

That shift is notable because Foundry had already spun off its proprietary mining business as Fortitude Mining in January 2025. Fortitude framed itself at launch as a “profit maximalist,” rather than a Bitcoin maximalist, focused on alternative networks that could offer better returns. Its website now describes the company as a “Zcash ecosystem leader” and an institutional venture mining platform, though it has not disclosed the amount of proprietary Zcash hashrate it controls. (fortitudemining.com)

The economics explain why Zcash has suddenly become more relevant for miners. Bitcoin mining margins remain pressured by network difficulty, post-halving rewards and intense competition for power. Zcash, by contrast, has a much smaller mining base, so a sharp move in token price can translate quickly into outsized revenue per unit of energy — until more machines are deployed and the hashrate catches up.

That is also the risk. Zcash’s revenue premium depends on price staying elevated and hashrate not rising too quickly. The network has already absorbed a doubling of computing power since September, and any further influx of Z15 Pro machines could compress the current spread.

For now, though, Zcash has become a rare proof-of-work market where miners can earn substantially more per megawatt than Bitcoin — a reversal for a token that, until last year’s rally, had spent much of the past cycle looking like a forgotten privacy coin.