Grayscale: Zcash mining profitability significantly higher than Bitcoin, mining activity grows over 2.5 times within the year

BlockBeats news, September 11: Grayscale research director Zach Pandl released an analysis pointing out that Zcash (ZEC) is a digital currency similar to Bitcoin but with added privacy features, and both maintain network security through proof-of-work (PoW) mining. Due to the strong price performance of Zcash tokens, its mining has become highly profitable. Although the Bitcoin network is far larger than Zcash, with total daily miner rewards of about $35 million, compared to about $2 million for Zcash, Zcash is more friendly to individual miners.

Grayscale estimates that Zcash's daily reward per mining machine is about 2 times that of Bitcoin, and the reward per megawatt-hour is about 4 times that of Bitcoin, although the mining machines for the two are not interoperable. Other sources also show that Zcash mining currently yields even more per megawatt-hour than some AI/high-performance computing cloud services. Higher profitability is encouraging more mining activity. Measured by standard hash rate metrics, Zcash's network-wide mining activity has grown more than 2.5 times this year. This has formed a virtuous cycle: higher token prices drive more mining activity, which in turn improves network security, and stronger security may in turn help sustain higher prices. Grayscale concluded that at current valuation levels, Zcash mining can be very profitable, which is attracting more hash rate to join and supporting network security.