Top Bitcoin Mining Pool Foundry Starts Digital Currency Staking Business

Foundry Digital, which is among the world’s top five bitcoin mining pools, launched a new business called “Foundry Staking” to provide services to institutions related to various proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain networks.

“We have made significant investments in engineering talent and PoS infrastructure to replicate our mining success in the fast-growing staking industry,” said Foundry CEO Mike Colyer, in a statement on Wednesday.

Proof-of-stake is the name of the consensus mechanism that requires users to stake an amount of cryptocurrency to become validators, as opposed to Bitcoin’s proof-of-work that requires users to purchase and run mining equipment.

Foundry will tailor its staking business to institutions such as exchanges, wallets, custodians, hedge funds, banks and venture capital firms. It will also provide various white-glove,customizable services for the mining pool’s clients.

Furthermore, the business will collaborate with digital asset prime brokerage Genesis to provide its clients with various treasury management services.

Foundry’s North America-based bitcoin mining pool represents about 13% of total hashrate, with over 20 exahashes per second of mining power, according to network data collected by BTC.com.

Foundry Staking’s range of services will cover 20 blockchain networks including Solana, Helium, The Graph and Horizen, according to a statement on Wednesday.

Foundry is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which is the parent company of CoinDesk.