Winklevoss Capital sells its Zcash rigs to a company it backs and takes stock

Winklevoss Capital received a warrant for ~43.3 million shares of the company as part of Cypherpunk Technologies’ purchase of a new Zcash mining operation.

The structure dilutes existing shareholders and gives Gemini founders a bigger slice of the Zcash bet. Cypherpunk is trading on the Nasdaq as CYPH.

43,290,042 new shares dilute every CYPH holder

Cypherpunk paid the $33.33 million price by issuing Winklevoss Treasury Investments a pre-funded warrant for 43,290,042 common shares, exercisable at $0.001 per share. That equates to an implied stock price of $0.77 a share.

CYPH gained 15.85% in the August 18 session on volume about 4.2 times its daily average. About the same 15.4% jump the stock had after its May earnings report.

The operation, Cypherpunk Mining, is live and running Z15 Pro machines. They are generating ~4.2 GSol/s of Equihash hash rate, which the company estimates to be about 18% of the total Zcash network.

The fleet is distributed across US facilities, and Cypherpunk calls it the world’s largest Zcash mining operation. That is an addressable market of more than $250 million a year at current ZEC prices, compared to about 43,800 ZEC in monthly mining awards across the network.

Cypherpunk already owns 323,394.38 ZEC or about 1.92% of circulating supply and says it wants 5%. Chief Investment Officer Will McEvoy said the mined coins give the company “financial and operational flexibility to fund future growth, the acquisition of additional ZEC, and new privacy-preserving technology investments.”

The firm brought in longtime mining operator Kevin Zhang to run mining.

Cameron Winklevoss frames the deal as a US play

“Zcash hashrate has been concentrated in a small number of miners, pools, and ASIC makers, almost all of it outside the United States,” Cameron Winklevoss wrote on X after the announcement.

He added that Cypherpunk’s fleet is “deployed across U.S. facilities, owned outright, and zero debt and power costs locked in low.” He and his brother Tyler marketed the launch as a rare chance for public-market investors to gain exposure to Zcash mining.

The company originated as Leap Therapeutics, a biotech that renamed itself to Cypherpunk Technologies in November 2025 after a $58.88 million private placement led by Winklevoss Capital, as Cryptopolitan reported. At that time, its treasury held some 203,775 ZEC bought at an average price of $245 a coin.

Earlier in 2026, Zcash had a security scare when Shielded Labs researcher Taylor Hornby discovered a bug in Zcash’s Orchard pool zero-knowledge circuit.

In theory, it could have allowed an attacker to mint fake ZEC without detection. ZEC fell more than 50% at the time and Cypherpunk’s stock crashed about 40%. Developers released an emergency patch in early June, followed by the Ironwood upgrade in July.

Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free.