Sovright's Mining Pool Testnet Is Live

Sovright has built the infrastructure to change that. Today, we are announcing that testnet is live for the Sovright Mining Pool, a new pool purpose-built for individual Zcash operators and small miners.

Why Zcash's mining layer has been slow to change

Proof-of-work blockchains like Zcash depend on miners to produce blocks. But miners don't connect to the network directly. Instead, they connect through pools, which aggregate hashrate, assign work, and distribute payouts. This means it's the pool that decides which transactions go into the blocks being built, not the individual miners.

For Zcash specifically, that means shielded transactions have been at the mercy of pool operators who have had no obligation to include them. In Zcash, at least one pool has filtered out shielded transactions, with no way for individual miners to opt out. The network has also seen a pool exceed 50% of hashrate at points in time. This is particularly worrying given that these private transactions are core to Zcash's vision for private financial sovereignty.

Technically speaking, the Bitcoin devs created a fix years ago at the protocol level. Stratum V2 returns transaction selection to individual miners, so a pool operator can no longer quietly decide what gets confirmed. Nobody implemented Stratum V2 for Zcash, because dominant pools had no reason to hand control back to miners and paying out in shielded ZEC adds technical complexity without an immediate revenue upside.

The urgency to change this is only increasing. Zcash's post Ironwood upgrades propose decreasing block spacing by a third. Faster blocks improve scalability and payment user experience, but also strengthen the advantages of the largest mining pools. Infrastructure that can absorb that pressure needs to exist before it arrives.

What Sovright's Mining Pool does differently

Sovright has built a mining pool you can connect to in 30 seconds, or run your own node and construct your own block templates. Either way, the fees are identical. Here are three ways Sovright's solution is different from every other pool currently operating on Zcash.

Shielded payouts

Every major Zcash mining pool today pays out to transparent addresses, meaning miner earnings are publicly visible onchain. Sovright pays in Orchard shielded ZEC. We believe that this should be a non-negotiable feature for a network built on the premise of financial privacy.

Built for independent miners

The Sovright Mining Pool is designed for smaller individual operators, with no minimum hashrate and fleet monitoring tools for people running real hardware. Operators like Foundry play an essential role serving compliance-first, institutional participants. Sovright is focusing on the global, informal coalition of independent miners that the Zcash network could not exist without.

Transaction selection

Using Stratum V2, individual miners choose which transactions go into the blocks they mine, fully, partially, or not at all, with identical fees at every level. In practice that means you can connect in 30 seconds and let the pool decide for you, or run your own node and construct your own block templates. The choice is yours, and it costs you nothing either way.

Let us know what you think

Over the past few weeks, Sovright has been running the pool against real hardware and making sure it's ready for the public. Now, we're inviting you to pressure-test it.

You can spin up a CPU miner on your own machine and point it at the pool today, without the need for any special hardware. There are no financial incentives at this stage. This is about exploring the interface, gathering real feedback, and building up towards mainnet launch together.

If you've been worried about Zcash's mining centralization problem and looking for a way to alleviate it, now is a good time to show up.