Digital Currency Group (DCG) CEO Barry Silbert, who remains one of the crypto industry’s biggest entrepreneurs, has shared a major infrastructure milestone within his portfolio as DCG-controlled mining platform Fortitude has officially confirmed the acquisition of a new 12.5 MW data center in Prosser, Nebraska.
The deal, valued at approximately $4.7 million, pushed Fortitude’s total owned power portfolio beyond 60 MW. The new milestone expands DCG’s industrial foundation for mining Zcash (ZEC). The holding company’s chief openly calls financial privacy “a fundamental right” and his next “large asymmetric bet” in the crypto industry.
Why is Fortitude buying up Nebraska for ZEC?
For most market participants, the focus on Zcash looks unconventional, but for Fortitude, it is pure mathematics. The Prosser site has become the company’s third facility in Nebraska. Deploying infrastructure within a single regional cluster gives the miner several operational advantages:
- Lower electricity costs. Concentrating its facilities in Nebraska gives Fortitude an electricity rate of around $0.045 per kWh.
- Lower Zcash production costs. Thanks to cheap energy, the direct cost of mining one ZEC falls by 40% to $40 per coin.
- Control over the network’s hash rate. Taking into account its $31.5 million contract with Bitmain to purchase 9,000 Antminer Z15 Pro miners, the company’s share of Zcash mining will exceed 28%.
Fortitude’s infrastructure push continues Silbert’s thesis that Bitcoin has lost its anonymity because of analytics services such as Chainalysis.
Explaining his stance on assets with the potential for exponential growth, the creator of the GBTC Bitcoin trust stated: “Bitcoin is not going to go up 500x unless the US dollar completely collapses. I think Zcash or Bittensor can achieve that type of return. Our portfolio is weighted accordingly.”
According to his estimates, up to 10% of Bitcoin liquidity, which is now about $128 billion, will flow into privacy-focused cryptocurrencies.
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Alongside the installation of the equipment, Fortitude is finalizing its merger with publicly traded medical technology company HeartSciences (HSCS). It is an all-stock transaction, and the preliminary proxy statement is already under review by the SEC.
Silbert’s plan is pragmatic: close the merger in the second half of 2026, change the ticker to TUDE, and list the first publicly traded institutional Zcash mining platform in history on Nasdaq.
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