ZEC price manipulation by Bitcoin miners: A calculated strategy

Whenever ZEC is mentioned, people often sigh and call it a legendary coin.

At the end of September 2025, ZEC was still at $53. It was a privacy coin that the market had forgotten for four years. After a steady decline from $290 in 2021 to below $30, no one mentioned it. Another privacy coin, Monero, was successively delisted by dozens of exchanges, and ZEC was silently assumed to be the "next one." Everyone was waiting for it to die.

Then, starting that month, ZEC surged 12 times.

Over 8 months, ZEC rose all the way from $53 to $600, peaking at $740. Its market cap surged from under $1 billion to nearly $100 billion, squeezing back into the top 15 cryptocurrencies.

Everyone saw ZEC rising, but most attributed it to the "privacy narrative" or the public endorsements of big names like Naval, Arthur Hayes, Mert Mumtaz, Balaji, and Cobie.

However, this author believes a more important background and factor for ZEC's rise is that Bitcoin miners are collectively making a market in ZEC.

Every Major ZEC Rally Coincides with a BTC Mid-Cycle Top

The first to notice that "every time ZEC surges, it coincides with a mid-cycle top for BTC" were some veteran BTC traders on Twitter.

Whenever ZEC experiences a significant magnitude rally, BTC always forms a mid-cycle high within the same timeframe. Once or twice could be a coincidence, but what about four times?

At the end of 2017, ZEC rallied from $200 to $870. In the same month, BTC peaked at $19,000. Both topped out almost simultaneously at the end of December, then entered a year-long bear market together.

From late 2020 to early 2021, ZEC rallied from $50 to $220. During the same period, BTC hit its first mid-cycle top at $64,000. BTC corrected to $30,000, ZEC fell back to $100.

In Q4 2021, ZEC rallied again from $100 to $290. BTC eventually topped out at $69,000 in that wave. Afterwards, both entered a three-year bear market together.

In this current cycle, ZEC has rallied from $53 to $600+, while BTC is repeatedly testing resistance around the $125,000 to $127,000 level.

Technical analysis trader Killa (@KillaXBT) also identified and pointed out this view.

More notably, this pattern doesn't hold true for other major altcoins. ETH's highs don't sync with BTC's as accurately. Even less so for newer ones like SOL and AVAX. ZEC is almost unique in its ability to "time" BTC's cycle tops like this.

ZEC's price pump seems orchestrated in coordination with BTC's rhythm. As BTC nears its top, ZEC launches. After BTC tops out, ZEC also enters a correction phase.

Back to the present.

ZEC's daily uptrend line has been broken. BTC is oscillating around the $75,000 level. If BTC breaks below $75k, the market generally believes the mid-cycle top for this bull run is essentially confirmed.

If historical patterns hold true, we are now in the window for the fourth ZEC-BTC resonance top.

The question then becomes, why does this pattern exist? Why ZEC and not another coin?

The answer might be hidden in the mining pool rankings.

ZEC Mining Pools: Another Game by BTC OGs

Open the ZEC block explorer and look at the hashrate distribution over the past 7 days: ViaBTC 34.2%. Foundry 27.74%. F2Pool 12.82%. 2Miners 7.58%. Antpool 6.8%.

The top 5 mining pools account for 89.14% of the hashrate. Among them, 4 pools – ViaBTC, Foundry, F2Pool, Antpool – collectively control 81.6%.

These 4 pools share a common identity: they are all veteran mining pools ranked in the top 10 of BTC's total network hashrate. Let's introduce them one by one.

ViaBTC, controlling 34.2% of ZEC's hashrate, was founded in Shenzhen in May 2016 by Yang Haipo, an early employee of Bitmain.

After leaving Bitmain, Yang Haipo started his own venture. During the 2017 BCH fork, he was one of its staunchest supporters. ViaBTC mined the first BCH block. After that battle, Yang Haipo, alongside Roger Ver, was considered a representative figure of the BCH camp. ViaBTC has consistently been a global top 5 pool for BTC. Beyond its pool business, Yang Haipo also founded the CoinEx exchange in 2017, and later the ViaWallet, ViaBTC Capital fund, and CoinEx Smart Chain, building a complete crypto ecosystem loop.

Foundry, controlling 27.74% of the hashrate, is the mining arm of the DCG empire and arguably the most critical player in this story.

Foundry Digital is a wholly owned subsidiary of Digital Currency Group (DCG). DCG is a crypto conglomerate founded by Barry Silbert, which also owns Grayscale, Genesis Trading, and CoinDesk.

Foundry USA Pool is the world's largest Bitcoin mining pool, consistently holding 28% to 32% of BTC's total network hashrate. Its clients are nearly all publicly listed mining companies in North America: Marathon, Riot, CleanSpark, Hut 8, Core Scientific. These companies cannot use Chinese mining pools due to compliance requirements, making Foundry their only viable option. Essentially, Foundry doesn't just sell hashrate; it sells "compliance." SOC 1 Type 2 certification, institutional-grade reporting, SLA support – this is the mining infrastructure service that listed miners can legally purchase.

Now, let's look at Foundry's deployment in ZEC. On March 11, 2026, Foundry announced its intention to launch a ZEC mining pool, which officially went live on April 13.

In one month, its hashrate share went from 0% to 27.74%. This is arguably the fastest hashrate migration in ZEC mining history.

Before Foundry entered, ViaBTC alone controlled 68% of the hashrate. After Foundry's entry, ViaBTC's share dropped to 34%. The new ~28% share was almost entirely captured by Foundry. This North American institutional capital formally took over a significant chunk of ZEC mining infrastructure, and the entire process took only a month.

Next is F2Pool, controlling 12.82% of the hashrate. Originally known as "Fish Pool," it was China's first Bitcoin mining pool, a name virtually unknown in the domestic community. It was founded by Wang Chun and Shenyu in April 2013 and is the oldest still-operating mining pool globally.

F2Pool remains in the global top 5 for BTC. It was also one of the first pools to support mining ZEC when its mainnet launched in October 2016. If you trace ZEC's mining history, F2Pool is present throughout almost the entire journey.

Then there is Antpool, controlling 6.8% of the hashrate, which is Bitmain's proprietary pool.

Antpool was launched by Bitmain in 2014. It directly connects "miner manufacturer + pool operator" in a vertically integrated model. Antpool is the 2nd or 3rd largest pool for BTC globally. While its 6.8% share in ZEC isn't the highest, it represents the direct interests of the mining machine supplier.

This brings us to a often overlooked fact about the ZEC mining ecosystem: ZEC's mining machine supply is almost completely monopolized by Bitmain.

ZEC uses the Equihash algorithm. The dominant ASIC miner supporting this algorithm is essentially just one: the Bitmain Antminer Z15 Pro, offering around 860 kSol/s per unit. Other manufacturers like MicroBT and Canaan Avalon have virtually no products in the ZEC space.

The entire ASIC miner supply for the ZEC network is almost entirely controlled by Bitmain.

The current total network hashrate is 13 to 15 GSol/s. Based on the Z15 Pro's hashrate, this implies roughly 15,000 to 17,000 Z15 Pro units are running on the network. The daily net profit per unit is approximately $55 to $56 (assuming $0.07/kWh electricity cost).

In a sense, the selling price of ZEC miners, second-hand miner prices, and the pace of new supply are all effectively controlled by Bitmain.

If the mining pool rankings are just indirect evidence of "them mining the coin," then the story of the holder rankings is more direct. Because those who mine the most ZEC and those who hold the most ZEC are not two different groups.

The most typical example is Foundry and Grayscale.

According to Arkham on-chain data, the Grayscale Zcash Trust holds approximately 390,298 ZEC, representing about 2.34% of the circulating supply. This trust is applying to the SEC to convert into a spot ETF, planning to list on NYSE Arca under the ticker ZCSH.

As previously mentioned, Foundry Digital, which holds 27.74% of ZEC's hashrate, is a wholly owned subsidiary of DCG, and Grayscale Investments is also a wholly owned subsidiary of DCG. Both companies share the same parent company: DCG.

Mining, holding, selling. DCG, as a single company, has completed the entire chain for ZEC, from the mining end to institutional compliant channels.

The next largest ZEC holder after DCG is Gemini, backed by the Winklevoss twins, Tyler and Cameron.

Gemini acts as custodian. The majority of the ZEC it holds likely comes from Cypherpunk Technologies (NASDAQ: CYPH). This was originally a biotech public company called Leap Therapeutics, focused on cancer drug R&D. In 2025, it laid off 75% of its staff, effectively halting its main business.

On November 12, 2025, this company announced a pivot, rebranding as Cypherpunk Technologies and repositioning itself as a "Digital Asset Treasury" (DAT) company dedicated to a single task: buying and hoarding ZEC.

The private placement on the day of the pivot raised $58.88 million. The sole institutional investor was Winklevoss Capital, the VC firm founded by Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss in 2012. This single firm provided "most of the funds" for the entire private placement.

Winklevoss Capital also placed its principal, Will McEvoy, on Cypherpunk's board and appointed him as the company's CIO. Furthermore, the first batch of 203,000 ZEC that Cypherpunk purchased on its pivot day was also custodied with Gemini.

The Winklevoss twins' credentials in the Bitcoin space are as deep as DCG's. Both entered the market as early Wall Street adopters around 2013-2014. Gemini and Grayscale have been two core nodes of Wall Street's compliant crypto pathway over the past decade.

As the coin price rises, miner demand increases, miner prices go up, and new stock sells out. As the coin price falls, miner production decreases, and second-hand machines are sold off. The pools coordinate with the mining machine manufacturers to orchestrate the rhythm of the entire supply chain.

This is quite a good business.

After all, the most valuable thing about a PoW coin is never the technology itself. It's the distribution of industrial interests across the chain's upstream and downstream.

Mining pools are the largest natural sellers in the ZEC spot market. The ZEC mined daily (currently 1.25 ZEC × 1150 blocks = 1437 ZEC/day) directly belongs to the pool. Over a year, this amounts to 520,000 ZEC. Miners don't just take these coins; typically, the pool receives them first and then distributes them to miners. This gives the pool complete timing discretion. They can sell concentratedly during high-liquidity market tops or hold off selling during lows.

Pools have a full "treasury." For instance, ViaBTC itself owns the CoinEx exchange, allowing it to sell the mined coins directly on its own platform. F2Pool owns Stakefish. Antpool is backed by Bitmain's financial services. Foundry is backed by DCG's entire financial system (Grayscale + Genesis Trading + Foundry). They are both supply-side sources and distribution-side players on exchanges, controlling the entire chain from mining to selling.

Pools have a decade of "coordination experience." On BTC, coordinated actions between pools at critical junctures (stopping block production, pushing forks, coordinating hashrate transfers) have occurred multiple times (most notably the 2017 BCH fork and the 2017 SegWit debate). For these same players, coordinating such actions on ZEC is muscle memory.

ViaBTC, Foundry, F2Pool, and Antpool – these four companies controlling 81.6% of ZEC's hashrate have founders and parent companies that are perhaps the most familiar with Bitcoin's cycles over the past decade.

The Odaily team also pulled the on-chain payout addresses of these four major mining pools. These addresses are publicly labelled by Zcashinfo (the official block explorer operated by Foundry), so there is no speculation involved.

Foundry's main receiving address is t1SqwRAAdSig6dE4EBPLonAait219VmkUjP. Since its launch in March 2026, this address has received a total of 22,696 ZEC – representing Foundry's entire mining revenue for just over a month. On-chain data shows these coins were almost entirely sent into the Orchard pool – ZEC's current newest generation shielded pool, using Halo 2 zero-knowledge proofs, making transactions completely untraceable after entry.

Meanwhile, ViaBTC's main receiving address, t1at7nVNsv6taLRrNRvnQdtfLNRDfsGc3Ak, has received a cumulative total of 1.73 million ZEC, worth over $1 billion at current prices. The coins go directly into the Sapling shielded pool (Zcash's previous generation shielded pool). This address operates very consistently, transferring to the Sapling pool in bulk every 5 to 8 blocks, leaving almost no inventory.

F2Pool's three main receiving addresses have received a cumulative total of 5.87 million ZEC. Two of these addresses currently have a zero balance. Their distribution method is mixed, with some going to transparent addresses and some to the Sapling shielded pool.

Antpool has the lowest distribution frequency, holding more coins in its own accounts, with almost no distribution activity recently.

ZEC offers optional privacy – users decide whether to use shielded features for each transaction. It is precisely this "optional" design that allows ZEC to survive regulatory scrutiny. Among these four major mining pools, the core distribution actions of three are completed within shielded pools.

On BTC, we can still count how many coins each pool deposits into Coinbase or Binance daily, trace every large transfer, and piece together each pool's inventory cycle – work done by specialized analysts. But on ZEC, on-chain data is largely invisible.

Once coins enter a shielded pool, how they are moved internally, who they ultimately go to, which exchange they end up on, and at what price they are sold – all of this is largely invisible. The level of concealment that mining pools enjoy on ZEC is an order of magnitude higher than in the BTC era.

ZEC, as a token, is inherently more suitable for market manipulation than BTC. And how could the top Bitcoin miners resist the opportunity to make a market in ZEC, the legendary coin?