Cypherpunk buys Winklevoss Capital mining fleet, says it controls 18% of Zcash hashrate

Cypherpunk Technologies said it has acquired a Zcash mining fleet from Winklevoss Capital in an equity transaction valued at $33.33 million, expanding its push into the privacy-focused cryptocurrency. The company said Tuesday that the fleet is already online at facilities across the United States and is producing about 4.2 GSol/s, which it says equals roughly 18% of Zcash’s current network hashrate. If those figures are accurate, the deal would give a single publicly traded company a large share of Zcash’s mining capacity. Cypherpunk’s mining expansion adds to its existing Zcash holdings. The company said it currently owns 323,394 ZEC, or about 1.9% of the cryptocurrency’s circulating supply, and has set a goal of eventually holding 5% of the ZEC supply. The company has described Zcash mining as having more attractive economics than Bitcoin mining or AI data center workloads under current market conditions. It also said those economics depend heavily on ZEC’s price, network hashrate, mining difficulty and operating costs. The move follows a sharp rise in ZEC during the second half of 2025, when renewed interest in privacy-focused cryptocurrencies helped push the asset higher. Cointelegraph said that rally drew more attention to Zcash and other privacy-preserving technologies after years of relatively muted interest. Despite a correction, Zcash (ZEC) is still up more than 1,300% over the past 12 months. Cointelegraph also noted that the Zcash network underwent its Ironwood upgrade on July 28. The upgrade introduced a new shielded transaction protocol to replace the Orchard pool and improve the network’s security architecture. The upgrade came after a flaw affecting Orchard was discovered. Under certain conditions, the flaw could have allowed an attacker to create counterfeit ZEC within the shielded pool without immediate detection. There was no evidence the vulnerability had been exploited, but the possibility of undetected ZEC creation posed a risk to the integrity of the cryptocurrency’s supply and highlighted the security challenges tied to privacy-preserving transactions.