Winklevoss-Backed Cypherpunk Says Zcash Mining Yields 4x Bitcoin (BTC) Mining

Update 18:53 UTC: The Bitcoin (BTC) backdrop to the mining comparison received a fresh, speculative data point on Oct. 13, when Anthropic's Claude AI model was asked for a price outlook ahead of its parent company's IPO and projected that BTC could trade between $500,000 and $1,000,000 by Jan. 1, 2027, with a stretch…

McEvoy's $1,000 Per Megawatt-Hour Claim

Cypherpunk Technologies, the digital asset company backed by billionaire twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, says crypto mining of the privacy coin Zcash (ZEC) currently earns roughly four times more per unit of electricity than Bitcoin (BTC) mining, and beats AI data center infrastructure as well. The remarks position Zcash, long a niche privacy asset, as the highest-yielding use of miner electricity available today. Will McEvoy, the firm's chief investment officer, set out the arithmetic in podcast remarks published on Tuesday: one megawatt-hour of power directed at Zcash mining produces about $1,000 in revenue. Electricity is the dominant cost in both lines of work, which is why returns are measured per megawatt-hour rather than per machine. Bitcoin (BTC) miners that converted capacity into AI hosting now earn about $240 per MWh on the same basis, an improvement from around $130 before those pivot deals, yet still roughly a quarter of the Zcash return. The framing is pointed: miners that spent two years rebranding around AI infrastructure now find themselves, on McEvoy's numbers, in the cheaper part of the stack. The comparison is unusually direct because both networks are secured through proof of work, so identical inputs can be measured against identical outputs. The claim lands while the Bitcoin (BTC) price narrative has shifted from coins to kilowatts, with mining, the industry that anchored Bitcoin's economics from its first block, chasing AI revenue after repeated halving events cut block rewards. McEvoy went further on valuation. A scenario in which Zcash grows to 10% of Bitcoin's market capitalization is reasonable enough, he argued, that ZEC could trade near $10,000 over the long term. He added that the company has set no official price target and that the figure reflects his assessment of Zcash's privacy technology rather than a formal forecast.

The Zcash yield debate is playing out against a fresh question mark over the security of proof-of-work assets themselves. ARK Invest's research director for digital assets, Lorenzo Valente, estimated in a livestream recorded Oct. 12 that roughly 70% of the questions ARK fields from registered investment advisers concern quantum computing risk rather than token metrics such as inflation or protocol revenue. His remarks came days after researcher Justin Drake posted on Oct. 7 that ECDSA, the elliptic-curve signature scheme behind Bitcoin and Ethereum keys, could break "in the worst case in months not years," citing AI's rapid progress in mathematics. Valente said ARK's internal view places the threat 10 to 20 years out, and that he is more confident than a year ago that Bitcoin will migrate to new signatures in time, pointing to the Bitcoin (BTC) Security Consortium announced in July with Strategy, BlackRock, Coinbase and Fidelity Digital Assets among founding members.

Bitcoin's long-term charts have, meanwhile, moved into territory that historically preceded its largest rallies, a backdrop relevant to any comparison of mining returns. On-chain account Lookonchain reported that the asset's price now sits simultaneously in strong undervaluation zones on the Dynamic Rainbow Chart and on the 200-week moving average heatmap, a synchronization that has occurred only four times before, in 2015, 2018, 2020 and 2022. The Rainbow model, a power law regression with a stated 94.3% fit since 2012, places price at the junction of its "BUY!" and "Basically a Fire Sale" bands, while the heatmap has turned cold blue, a color historically associated with flushed leverage and strategic accumulation.

The dual reading on the two long-term models is not itself a bottom call, and follow-up commentary on the signals has stressed the distinction. The Dynamic Rainbow Chart, a power regression fitted to daily price data since 2012, and the 200-week moving average heatmap, which colors data points by the average's monthly rate of change, both classify past price relative to a long-term trend, so labeling the current zone as cheap is a description of history rather than a forecast. BlockchainCenter, which publishes the Rainbow model, states the tool is for viewing long-term price movement and not a scientific predictor, while public discussion has noted the curve can be adjusted to fit past data. Observers caution that an undervaluation signal and a confirmed buying point are separate judgments.

The Bitcoin backdrop to the mining comparison received a fresh, speculative data point on Oct. 13, when Anthropic's Claude AI model was asked for a price outlook ahead of its parent company's IPO and projected that BTC could trade between $500,000 and $1,000,000 by Jan. 1, 2027, with a stretch target of $1.5 million. The forecast is conditional on a full-blown bull market catalyzed by a major nation, possibly the United States or another G7 country, adopting Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset, alongside corporate treasury adoption and a hyperbitcoinization narrative. Bitcoin was changing hands around $83,200–$83,500 at the time of the prediction, below its prior all-time high near $126,000, and the model's own technical framing notes that a sustained break above $90,000–$100,000 would be needed before any path toward those multi-cycle extensions opens. The projection is explicitly speculative and would require geopolitical and policy shifts well beyond current conditions.

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The Bitmain Bottleneck

Scarcity of hardware is what keeps the gap from closing on its own. Bitmain, the Chinese rig manufacturer, is effectively the only company producing dedicated Zcash mining machines, and its monthly output is estimated in the thousands of units. An operator ordering new machines today would wait roughly seven to eight months for delivery, and possibly longer. Bitmain has limited reason to expand the line: the Zcash equipment market is far smaller than the Bitcoin rig business that anchors its revenue, so higher ZEC mining margins do not translate into a proportionally larger market for machines. New entrants face the same wall from the other side. Building a Zcash-specific chip means custom semiconductor design, then securing foundry capacity at a major manufacturer such as Taiwan's TSMC, where AI chipmakers compete for the same wafer allocation. The result is a market in which elevated profitability can persist without attracting the capacity that would erode it. Cypherpunk sits near the front of that queue. The company controls about 18% of total Zcash network hashrate, the measure of computing power committed to the chain, describes its facilities as the world's largest dedicated Zcash operation, and says it intends to keep its share between 18% and 20%. Roughly one in five units of Zcash computing power now runs under one roof. The market has not matched the enthusiasm. ZEC changed hands near $1,183 on Tuesday, down 11.56% over the week, even though it gained 1.39% in the past 24 hours. The slide landed amid broad deleveraging that recently produced a $774 million liquidation wave across crypto derivatives, with longs taking most of the hit. The delivery lag functions as an entry fee for anyone considering expansion: by the time new machines arrive, the economics that justified the order may have moved.

Read with that self-interest in mind, the fourfold claim splits into two parts. The $1,000-per-MWh figure is Cypherpunk's own accounting, published by a firm that controls 18% of the network it is praising, so it should be treated as an operator's case until independent data confirms it. The structural argument is harder to dismiss: equipment scarcity is verifiable and it protects early movers whatever the exact revenue number. The $10,000 scenario is a different kind of wager, one against Bitcoin maximalism and for the idea that privacy demand can win ZEC a durable share of the altcoin market's value. Whether the fourfold gap holds will be decided by Bitmain's production choices and AI foundry demand, not by the argument itself.