Zcash ZEC

At 5¢/kWh the most profitable Zcash miner today, the Bitmain Antminer Z15 Pro, earns about $48.72 a day and burns $3.34 of electricity, leaving about $45.38 a day. 8 of 8 Equihash miners we track are profitable at that price. Set your own power price above and the whole page recalculates.

Ranked by profit per day at 5¢/kWh: Bitmain Antminer Z15 Pro ($45.38/day, 840 kH/s at 2,780 W), Bitmain Antminer Z15 ($22.55/day, 420 kH/s at 1,510 W), Innosilicon A9++ ZMaster ($6.26/day, 140 kH/s at 1,550 W). The most efficient machine we track is the Bitmain Antminer Z15 Pro at 3.31 J/kH; cheap power favours raw hashrate, expensive power favours efficiency, so the order changes with your price.

At today's price and difficulty the Bitmain Antminer Z15 Pro breaks even at about 73¢ per kWh: above that it costs more to run than it earns. Pool fees (usually 1-4%), cooling and any hosting margin come on top, so plan with a buffer. Of the 8 machines we track, 8 are in profit at 3¢/kWh, 8 at 6¢ and 7 at 10¢, which is why miners chase cheap power.

The fastest payback at 5¢/kWh is the Bitmain Antminer Z15 Pro: about $5,299 for the machine, $45.38 profit a day, so roughly 4 months if price and difficulty stayed where they are today. In practice difficulty usually rises as new machines ship, so real payback is longer; a falling coin price stretches it further, a rally shortens it.

The Bitmain Antminer Z15 Pro, at 840 kH/s, mines about 0.039 ZEC a day today, worth $48.72. That is 0.0026% of the network's 31.88 GH/s. The whole network mints about 1,459 ZEC a day ($1.81M), and every miner earns its share of hashrate.

On its own, one Bitmain Antminer Z15 Pro would find a Zcash block about once every 33 days on average, and luck can stretch that a long way. That is why almost everyone mines in a pool: the pool finds blocks every day and pays each miner by its share of the work. FPPS and PPS+ pools pay a fixed amount per share (fees often 2-4%), PPLNS pools pay out only when the pool finds a block (often 0-2%, but lumpier).

Right now each block pays about 1.250 ZEC including fees, with a block every 74 seconds on average, about 1,459 ZEC a day. 16.23 million of the 21.00 million maximum are already out (77%). The block reward halved to 1.5625 ZEC in November 2024, with a block every 75 seconds. 20% of it goes to development funding, so miners receive 1.25 ZEC per block plus fees; the next halving, expected around late 2028, cuts that again.

Equihash is a memory-oriented proof-of-work published in 2016 by Alex Biryukov and Dmitry Khovratovich; Zcash uses the 200,9 parameters. ASICs (mainly Bitmain's Antminer Z series) replaced GPUs from 2018. Hashrate is counted in solutions per second (sol/s). The same machines mine Pirate Chain and other Equihash 200,9 coins. We track 8 Equihash machines; judge them by J/kH (efficiency) against your power price, then by price per kH, cooling type and the warranty and repair options where you will run them.

One megawatt of power runs about 359 Bitmain Antminer Z15 Pro units. At 5¢/kWh that is roughly $495,303 a month in profit before pool fees, cooling overhead and staff, for about $1.90M of machines. Site profit is very sensitive to the power price: every 1¢/kWh costs about $7,296 a month at one megawatt. CryptoSites.io lists powered land, container farms and hosting with the power price on every listing.

Pick a machine for your power price (see the table above), then sort out power and cooling: most ASICs need 200-277 V at 10-30 A each, hydro models usually 380-415 V three-phase and a cooling loop, and air-cooled units are too loud for a home. Set up a Zcash wallet, point the machine at a pool, and watch temperatures in the first days. If you don't have cheap power and space, hosting is the usual route: a host runs the machine for an all-in price per kWh. CryptoSites.io lists both powered sites and hosting.