Hashrate Jurisdiction Diversity as a Network Resilience Issue

Governance
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Foundry Digital is launching an institutional Zcash mining pool next month. Institutional capital entering ZEC hashrate is a net positive for network security. More hashrate is better than less hashrate.

But it raises a question worth thinking about now rather than later.

Current pool distribution is concentrated. Flypool appears to have gone quiet. ViaBTC holds roughly 32%. F2Pool holds roughly 16%. Pool distribution is visible. Physical jurisdiction distribution is not.

Where are the ASICs? Under which legal frameworks do they operate? If a single jurisdiction holds the majority of ZEC hashrate and that jurisdiction enacts restrictions on privacy coins, what happens to network resilience?

This is not a hypothetical. Multiple US states have proposed or enacted restrictions on privacy coin transactions. The EU’s MiCA framework imposes new requirements on privacy-preserving protocols. Mining operations concentrated in any single regulatory environment carry a systemic risk that pool distribution statistics do not capture.

Foundry’s pool will be US-based and KYC-compliant. That is appropriate for institutional participants. It is also a data point about where new hashrate is being concentrated.

Geographic and jurisdictional diversity of mining infrastructure is a network resilience question. It sits alongside node distribution and pool distribution as a factor in long-term protocol health.

Should the community consider hashrate jurisdiction diversity as a governance priority? Should ZCG evaluate proposals that promote geographic distribution of mining infrastructure? With new mining operations scaling in Latin America and Northern Europe, is this the right time to think about it?

This is a governance question, not a policy position. Interested in the community’s thinking.

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Jurisdiction diversity is the kind of resilience that compounds quietly. Concentrated hash power under one regulatory framework creates risk that pool stats don’t capture. Worth pairing this with the operator incentive work already underway on this forum. Geographic distribution at the infrastructure layer is just as strategic as at the mining layer.

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Good framing. The operator incentive work is relevant context. Node distribution and hashrate distribution are related but distinct problems. A well-distributed node network with geographically concentrated hashrate still carries the same regulatory risk at the mining layer. Worth asking whether incentive structures should consider both.