Miners rerouting to Zcash are chasing about $620m of annual block rewards

Zcash pays out roughly 43,800 ZEC a month in block rewards ^[16], and no amount of incoming electricity changes that number. At the $1,180 CoinMarketCap lists ^[9], the pool is worth about $51.7m a month, or $620m a year ^[2]. Riot Platforms' 20-year Anthropic compute deal, reported on August 25 at $9bn ^[19], averages $450m a year. One miner's single AI contract equals about 73% of every Zcash block reward issued at a record price ^[3].

The per-MWh gap is real. The Energy Mag's $727.30 for a Z15 Pro against $179 for a state-of-the-art S23 Pro is 4.06 times ^{[1] [3] [1]}, and the Zcash rig's revenue would have to fall about 75% from its early-September $708 to meet the Bitcoin machine ^[4]. Compression is coming from the hashrate side. Per-MWh revenue slipped about 3% from the August peak ^[5] while ZEC climbed from its $890 August record through $1,000 on September 4 ^{[10] [9]}; if a rig's take tracks price divided by network hashrate, a 12% price gain alongside a 3% revenue decline implies roughly 15% more hashrate splitting the same coins ^[5].

Grayscale said assets in ZCSH passed $500m within two weeks of the August 25 listing ^{[6] [7]}. Roughly $100m of it came from DCG International Investments, an affiliate of Grayscale's parent, which handed over 85,705.32563297 ZEC for shares ^[8]. About a fifth of the fund was contributed in kind from inside the sponsor's own corporate group ^[6], at an implied $1,167 a coin ^[7]. On September 3 Grayscale credited "the hard money thesis and growing awareness around digital privacy" for the run ^[11].

Cypherpunk Technologies paid $33.33m in August for about 4.2 GSol/s, roughly 18% of the network ^[12]. That share earns 7,884 ZEC a month, about $9.3m at $1,180, so gross mining revenue covers the fleet's cost in roughly 3.6 months before power bills ^[8]. The supply target is the harder sum. A $20bn market cap at $1,180 implies about 16.9m coins outstanding, so moving from nearly 2% of supply to 5% ^[13] means acquiring some 508,000 ZEC, and at 7,884 coins a month that takes 64 months ^[9]. It also assumes an 18% share holds, in a network where Foundry USA's institutional pool got close to 30% of mining share within a month of launching in March ^[14].

Miners are pointing electricity at Zcash ^[20] because the Bitcoin side keeps getting worse: BTC topped $82,000 on September 3 and trades near $77,000, with difficulty reportedly set to rise again on September 19 ^[17], and Canaan reported $17.7m of second-quarter mining revenue against a $97.6m net loss, with third-quarter revenue guided to as little as $11m ^[18].

In my view the spread compresses toward the marginal Zcash miner's power cost within a few quarters, because the pool is fixed in coin and each new megawatt divides it further. The counter-case is simple: if ZEC keeps rising faster than the solrate, the dollar spread widens even as each miner's coin share falls, and the early fleets pay for themselves before the crowd lands. A third path has the ETF flow reversing, taking the price and the per-MWh figure down together. The compression thesis fails if the next Z15 Pro reading comes in above the August $727.30 with hashrate higher too.