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Zcash is beating Bitcoin on raw revenue. Not by a little — by a lot.
As of early September, the Antminer Z15 Pro was pulling in roughly $708 in gross revenue per megawatt-hour. The Antminer S23 Pro, Bitcoin’s workhorse machine, managed just $179 over the same period. That’s nearly a 4:1 gap, and it’s moving miners fast. The Z15 Pro burns about 66.7 kWh per day and yields around $47 in gross revenue before expenses at an electricity rate of $0.05 per kWh — numbers that are hard to ignore when you’re running an industrial-scale operation and every dollar of electricity has to justify itself.
Industrial operators think in megawatts-to-dollars ratios. That’s basically the whole game. And right now, Zcash wins that game over Bitcoin — though it still trails AI cloud computing loads, which can return approximately $941 per MWh. So Zcash isn’t the top of the food chain. But it’s clearly not the bottom either.
Grayscale ETF and ZEC Price Spike
A lot of what’s driving this comes down to Zcash’s token price. ZEC surpassed $1,000 on September 4, a move that grabbed attention across the mining sector. The timing wasn’t random. Grayscale’s Zcash ETF — ticker ZCSH — started trading on August 25, and the market responded hard. Assets under management for the product surpassed $500 million shortly after launch, which is a serious number for a fund that’s only weeks old.
Institutional money is following. Cypherpunk Technologies announced plans to build a major Zcash mining operation, and it’s doing so in collaboration with Winklevoss Capital. The goal is to significantly boost the total computational power dedicated to Zcash mining. No specific capacity figures were disclosed, but the involvement of Winklevoss Capital puts real institutional weight behind the move.
And it’s not just Cypherpunk. Foundry — a major name in Bitcoin mining infrastructure — launched a dedicated Zcash mining pool. The service targets professional miners and companies, and it comes with strict compliance requirements including KYC and AML procedures. That’s a notable detail. Foundry isn’t building a casual retail product here. It’s building something for operators who run serious, regulated books.
Network Sol Rate Jumps 20% in Days
The rush into Zcash mining is already visible at the network level. The sol rate — Zcash’s equivalent of Bitcoin’s hash rate — climbed from 25 GSol/s at the end of August to over 30 GSol/s by early September. That’s more than a 20% jump in just a few days. A surge that fast means a lot of machines got plugged in very quickly.
And that surge is already eating into margins. Revenue per MWh dropped from $727.30 to $708 as the sol rate climbed. More miners sharing the same block rewards means each miner takes home less. It’s the same math that’s squeezed Bitcoin miners for years — it just happens to be playing out in Zcash right now, on a compressed timeline.
Zcash’s overall network is still tiny compared to Bitcoin’s. The infrastructure gap is massive. Bitcoin’s mining ecosystem has years of capital investment, established hosting relationships, and deep secondary markets for equipment. Zcash doesn’t have any of that at scale. So while the revenue-per-MWh figures look great on paper, the risks are real — ZEC price could drop, the sol rate could keep climbing, or both could happen at once.
Some Bitcoin miners aren’t waiting around to find out. They’re diversifying into AI and high-performance computing, where loads can return roughly $941 per MWh. That’s a bigger number than Zcash, and AI workloads don’t carry the same token-price volatility risk. A few operators are already reallocating resources toward that sector, treating crypto mining as one option among several rather than the only game in town.
The margin compression dynamic isn’t unique to Zcash — it’s basically how all proof-of-work mining works. More competition, thinner slices. Bitcoin miners learned that lesson through multiple halving cycles and years of network growth. Zcash miners are learning it in weeks.
What’s probably keeping operators interested despite the compression is the gap that still exists. Even at $708 per MWh, Zcash is paying nearly four times what Bitcoin is. That spread can absorb a lot of margin erosion before the math flips. Whether it stays wide enough to justify the infrastructure investment — especially given ZEC’s price history — is unclear. No one seems to have a clean answer on that yet.
The Foundry pool launched with KYC and AML requirements baked in from day one.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How much more revenue does Zcash mining generate compared to Bitcoin mining?
As of early September, the Antminer Z15 Pro generated about $708 in gross revenue per megawatt-hour mining Zcash, versus roughly $179 per MWh for the Antminer S23 Pro mining Bitcoin — nearly a 4:1 difference.
What is the Grayscale Zcash ETF and when did it launch?
Grayscale’s Zcash ETF trades under the ticker ZCSH and began trading on August 25; assets under management surpassed $500 million shortly after launch.
Why It Matters
The substantial revenue advantage of Zcash over Bitcoin in mining profitability highlights a potential shift in miner interest and investment strategies within the cryptocurrency ecosystem. As miners increasingly prioritize returns on energy consumption, the emergence of dedicated mining pools, such as the one launched by Foundry, could further accelerate this trend, potentially impacting Bitcoin's network security and market dynamics. This development underscores the ongoing competition among cryptocurrencies to attract mining resources, which could influence future innovations in mining technology and energy efficiency.
