Grayscale says Zcash mining earns twice as much per machine as Bitcoin and four times as much per megawatt-hour. Here is how the two networks compare.
Zcash has spent 2026 doing what Bitcoin has not. ZEC traded at $1,112 on 12 September 2026, according to CoinGecko, after reaching a decade high of $1,297.77 on 9 September, per TradingView data. Bitcoin, meanwhile, sat near $77,200 on 11 September, still unable to hold $80,000 and down on the year.
The divergence is stark enough that miners have noticed. And a new note from Grayscale Research puts numbers on what they are seeing.
Per machine and per unit of electricity, Zcash is now the more profitable coin to mine. That is not a sentence the market has been able to write about a Bitcoin fork in a very long time.
Zcash, the privacy-focused Bitcoin fork launched in 2016, shields transaction details by default rather than exposing them on a public ledger like most chains. That feature sat largely ignored for years. It is now the centre of the trade.
ZEC has risen roughly 19-fold over the past year, and the token's market capitalization sits around $18.6 billion, ranking it 10th overall, according to CoinMarketCap data. The run has been violent in both directions: the token fell 9.85% in 24 hours even while holding a 15.30% gain over the past week.
Three things pulled institutional money in. Grayscale converted its Zcash Trust into an exchange-traded fund that listed on NYSE Arca on 25 August, and the product held about $463.2 million in assets within two weeks. Cypherpunk Technologies, a Nasdaq-listed firm, bought a mining fleet from Winklevoss Capital in a $33.33 million equity transaction, giving it roughly 18% of network hashrate. And Grayscale Research published a thesis arguing that Zcash has "second mover advantages" against Bitcoin as AI systems make financial surveillance easier at scale.
That report noted ZEC remains below 1% of Bitcoin's market capitalization, and estimated the token could be worth more than $4,000 if it reached 5%. Grayscale also called Zcash a high-risk asset with potentially uneven returns, which the price action has already demonstrated.
Here is where the comparison gets interesting, and where Grayscale's numbers do the heavy lifting.
Bitcoin still pays its miners roughly 17 times more in aggregate, and that gap reflects scale. Bitcoin's network contains vastly more computing power, so the same reward pool is split among far more machines.
Flip to the individual operator and the picture inverts. Grayscale Research director Zach Pandl estimated that a Zcash miner earns about twice the daily revenue of a comparable Bitcoin miner, and roughly four times as much per megawatt-hour of electricity consumed. Pandl noted that the power-adjusted figure now exceeds what some AI and high-performance computing cloud services generate. This is a striking comparison for a year when data centers are aggressively chasing megawatts.
Pandl described the result as a reinforcing cycle: a higher ZEC price makes mining more attractive, new machines raise hashrate, and the added computing power makes the chain more expensive to attack. Better security, in Grayscale's framing, then supports investor confidence.
The hashrate response has been immediate. Zcash's network computing power has risen more than two and a half times this year, briefly pushing past 30 GSol/s for the first time in early September.
The catch is built into the protocol. Zcash adjusts mining difficulty to match the computing power on the network, so every machine that switches on makes every other machine slightly less productive. Unless ZEC price or fee revenue keeps climbing, the per-machine edge compresses on its own.
That is already visible. Miner revenue slipped about 3% from where it sat when ZEC traded below $900, even as the token pushed higher, because difficulty absorbed the gain.
Two dated events sit ahead. Zcash coinholders are voting on the scope of the NU7 network upgrade, including possible changes to block speed and issuance, with voting closing on 14 September. A halving follows in late 2028, which will cut the subsidy that currently makes the economics work.
The leverage is the nearer risk. Zcash's derivatives open interest reached a record near $2.4 billion, and altcoin perpetual futures open interest passed Bitcoin's in early September for the first time since December 2024. That is the kind of positioning that unwinds quickly.
For now, the trade is simple enough to state. Bitcoin miners have the bigger business, and Zcash miners have the better margin. Whether that holds depends on ZEC holding a price high enough to keep the machines worth running.
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