Zcash earns four times Bitcoin's revenue per megawatt-hour on a seventieth of the power

Divide $2 million by $35 million and Zcash's entire mining network is collecting about 5.7% of Bitcoin's daily revenue ^[1][1]. Now divide that by four, because Grayscale puts Zcash's revenue per megawatt-hour at four times Bitcoin's, and the implied Zcash power draw comes to about 1.4% of Bitcoin's, a seventieth ^[4][2].

That rate is high on a small base. Annualized, $2 million a day is about $730 million a year split among every Zcash miner there is, against $12.8 billion for Bitcoin ^[3]. A tenth of Zcash's hash rate would gross roughly $200,000 a day ^[7]. Power, cooling, maintenance, facility costs and pool fees come out of that, because Grayscale compared revenue and not net profit ^[7].

The hardware does not move. Zcash rigs run Equihash and Bitcoin rigs run SHA-256, so an operator cannot point an existing fleet at the better number ^[6]. Four times the revenue per megawatt-hour on twice the revenue per machine puts the Equihash rig at roughly half the power draw of a SHA-256 rig ^[3][4][4].

Zcash retargets difficulty to the computing power on the network, so each unit of hash rate gets less productive as machines show up, unless the ZEC price or fee income rises with them ^[9]. Hash rate is already more than 2.5 times its level at the start of the year ^[8].

Block rewards are paid in ZEC ^[16]. The coin went above $1,000 for the first time on Sep. 4, roughly 2,300% above the $42 it traded at in September 2025 ^[11][12]. Volume during the move was $1.2 billion and market value reached about $16.8 billion ^[13]. At that price, roughly 16.8 million of the 21 million ZEC that will ever exist are already outstanding ^[10][5].

Pandl described the hash rate increase as a reinforcing cycle in which a higher price attracts machines, the machines raise the cost of attacking the chain, and better security supports investor confidence in the asset ^[15]. Grayscale sells that asset to US investors through the ZCSH fund on NYSE Arca ^[14].

If ZEC holds above $1,000 and Equihash capacity keeps arriving, difficulty takes the four-times gap down. The operators who bought rigs first get paid; the later ones own single-purpose machines on a network a seventieth the size of Bitcoin's ^[2]. If ZEC retraces toward last September's $42 ^[12], the pot shrinks with the coin. In my view the capex has to survive that second case. Grayscale's assumptions put Zcash's revenue per unit of electricity above the income from some AI and high-performance computing cloud services ^[5], and that comparison holds only while the price does. What would show this reading wrong: Zcash hash rate doubling again with the per-megawatt-hour gap still near four times ^[8][4]. That would mean price growth outran dilution, and the rigs paid for themselves.