Cypherpunk Technologies acquired a Zcash mining fleet from Winklevoss Capital for $33.33 million, launching what it describes as the world's largest Zcash mining operation. The transaction closed Tuesday.
The operation is already live across U.S. facilities, producing approximately 4.2 GSol/s of hashrate—18 percent of Zcash's current total hashrate. Combined with Cypherpunk's existing holdings of 323,394 ZEC (1.9 percent of circulating supply), the company is now positioned to hit its target of 5 percent ZEC ownership.
Zcash rallied more than 1,300 percent over the past 12 months as renewed institutional interest in privacy-focused networks accelerated. The Zcash network deployed its Ironwood upgrade on July 28, introducing a new shielded transaction protocol that replaced the previous Orchard pool after a discovered flaw that could have allowed undetected ZEC creation within the shielded pool.
Cypherpunk is banking on better mining economics for ZEC versus Bitcoin or AI data center workloads under current market conditions—though that edge hinges on ZEC's price, overall network hashrate, difficulty, and operational costs.
