Winklevoss Capital received a warrant to acquire approximately 43.3 million company shares as part of Cypherpunk Technologies' purchase of a new Zcash mining enterprise.
This structure dilutes existing shareholders and gives the Gemini founders a larger stake in Zcash investments. Cypherpunk shares trade on Nasdaq under the ticker CYPH.
43,290,042 New Shares Lead to Dilution for Every CYPH Holder
Cypherpunk paid $33.33 million by issuing a pre-paid warrant to Winklevoss Treasury Investments for 43,290,042 common shares exercisable at $0.001 per share. This implies an estimated share price of $0.77 per share.
CYPH shares rose 15.85% on the August 18 session with trading volume roughly 4.2 times the daily average. A similar jump of 15.4% occurred following the May earnings report release.
The Cypherpunk Mining project is launched and operating on Z15 Pro machines. They generate an Equihash hash rate of ~4.2 GSol/s, which the company estimates accounts for about 18% of the total Zcash network.
The fleet is distributed across facilities in the U.S., and Cypherpunk calls it the world's largest Zcash operation. This is a potential market worth over $250 million annually at current $ZEC prices, compared to roughly 43,800 $ZEC in monthly network mining rewards.
The company already holds 323,394.38 $ZEC, about 1.92% of the total circulating cryptocurrency, and expresses a desire to acquire an additional 5%. Chief Investment Officer Will McEvoy stated that the mined coins give the company "financial and operational flexibility to fund future growth, acquire additional $ZEC, and invest in new privacy-enabling technologies."
The company invited Kevin Zhang, a long-time mining operator, to lead the mining operations.
Cameron Winklevoss Describes the Deal as a Play on the U.S. Market
"Zcash was concentrated in the hands of a small number of miners, pools, and ASIC manufacturers, almost all of which were outside the United States," Winklevoss wrote on X after the announcement.
He added that Cypherpunk's fleet is "hosted at facilities in the United States, is fully owned, debt-free, and has low energy costs." He and his brother Tyler presented the launch as a rare opportunity for public market investors to gain exposure to Zcash mining.
The company was originally named Leap Therapeutics, a biotech firm that rebranded as Cypherpunk Technologies in November 2025 following a $58.88 million private placement led by Winklevoss Capital, as Cryptopolitan reported. At that time, its treasury held approximately 203,775 $ZEC purchased at an average price of $245 per coin.
Earlier in 2026, Zcash faced a security issue when Shielded Labs researcher Taylor Hornby discovered a bug in the zero-knowledge scheme of the Orchard pool used by Zcash.
Theoretically, this could have allowed an attacker to create counterfeit $ZEC without detection. At the time, $ZEC prices fell by more than 50%, and Cypherpunk shares plunged by about 40%. Developers released an emergency patch in early June, followed by the Ironwood update in July.
