Fortitude Mining, the Zcash-focused mining operation wholly owned by Digital Currency Group, has appointed former Hut 8 chief executive Jaime Leverton as its new CEO as the company prepares to enter public markets through a merger with HeartSciences.
Leverton will succeed Andrea Childs on September 21, with Childs transitioning to the chief operating officer role. The leadership change arrives at a pivotal moment for the company, which is working to complete its proposed combination with HeartSciences before the end of the year.
A proven operator takes the helm
Leverton brings direct experience guiding a mining company through the transition to public markets. During her tenure at Hut 8, she oversaw the Bitcoin miner’s merger with US Bitcoin Corp and its transformation into a US-domiciled company listed on Nasdaq.
That track record is precisely what Fortitude needs as it navigates its own listing process. The merger, announced in June, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, with the combined company trading on Nasdaq under the ticker TUDE, subject to approval.
Dominant position in Zcash mining
Fortitude is not a marginal player in its chosen network. The company mined 72,696 ZEC in the first half of 2026, representing approximately 28 percent of the Zcash network’s total production during the period. It reported revenue of 20.9 million USD for the second quarter.
The company operates more than 60 megawatts of power capacity across seven sites spanning South Dakota, Nebraska, Texas and New York. In July, Fortitude agreed to purchase 9,000 Bitmain Antminer Z15 Pro machines, expected to add 7.56 GSol/s of equihash hashrate when shipments arrive in the fourth quarter.
Fortitude has mined ZEC since 2019 and formally launched as a vertically integrated mining platform in 2025, consolidating what had been a distributed operation under a single corporate structure.
Riding the Zcash wave
The timing of the listing push coincides with an extraordinary run in the ZEC market. Zcash traded around 1,424 USD on Thursday, up approximately 185 percent over the past 30 days and more than 2,600 percent over the past year, according to CoinGecko data.
The latest leg of the rally followed Wednesday’s disclosure by Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang that the investment firm holds ZEC and is an investor in the Zcash Open Development Lab. Huang described Zcash as a “private complement to Bitcoin” and defended its inflation-funded developer fund.
Privacy-focused cryptocurrencies have dramatically outperformed the broader market. As of September 6, the privacy sector was up 213 percent from Bitcoin’s October 2025 peak, while every other crypto sector tracked by Glassnode remained below its level at that time. ZEC alone accounts for 62 percent of the privacy sector’s market capitalization, according to Glassnode.
Strategic calculus
For a miner, a rising token price directly improves unit economics, and Fortitude’s 28 percent share of network production gives it substantial leverage to ZEC’s appreciation. The pending Z15 Pro fleet expansion, arriving in the fourth quarter alongside the expected merger close, would deepen that exposure further.
The public listing also opens access to capital markets at a moment when investor appetite for crypto mining equities has been selective. Bitcoin treasury and mining firms have faced scrutiny over leverage and paper losses this year, and a Zcash pure-play presents a differentiated, if more concentrated, proposition.
Leverton’s mandate will likely extend beyond the merger itself: communicating the value of a privacy-coin miner to public market investors, many of whom remain wary of the regulatory ambiguity surrounding privacy assets, will test her capital-markets credentials earned at Hut 8.
The executive shuffle also preserves continuity, with Childs remaining as COO after leading the company through its vertical integration and merger agreement.
What comes next
Watch for the merger’s closing timeline in the fourth quarter, the deployment of the 9,000 new Antminer units, and whether Fortitude’s listing prompts other application-specific miners to pursue public market debuts.
With Zcash’s NU7 mainnet upgrade targeted for November, promising 25-second blocks among other improvements, network fundamentals will remain in focus precisely as Fortitude begins its life as a publicly traded company.
Market snapshot at press time (CoinGecko, 14:45 UTC): Bitcoin trades at 80,662 USD, Ethereum at 2,572.57 USD and Solana at 109.87 USD.
leverton did the hut 8 merger so she knows the SPAC-adjacent route well. decent hire for TUDE
a zcash-only miner listing on nasdaq in 2026 is not something i had on my bingo card. DCG must think there is real retail appetite for privacy-coin exposure
a privacy coin miner going public under TUDE while privacy regulation is still a minefield. bold does not begin to cover it
20.9m quarterly revenue on 60 megawatts is a thin margin business. hope TUDE investors read the power cost line before the Q4 close
60 megawatts for 20.9m a quarter is roughly 3.5m per MW annually. the power contract must be dirt cheap or the margin is paper thin
childs shifting to COO a week before the merger vote says the board wanted a nasdaq-tested face on the deal. leverton closed the hut 8 route before, smart swap
one company mined 28 percent of all ZEC in h1 and people still call zcash decentralized lol. timing this listing while ZEC is up 2600 percent on the year is undeniably smart though
28 percent in h1 is wild but zcash survived worse hashrate concentration from nicehash spikes years back
28 percent concentration got tolerated because equihash asics were supposed to fix botnet centralization. instead one balance sheet owns the network, the listing just adds a ticker to it
equihash hashrate concentration has been an open issue for years and 28 percent makes it worse. one entity controlling that much of network production is how 51 percent conversations start
fair on concentration but equihash has been asic dominated since 2018, one entity at 28 percent changes less than people think
fair, but unlike nicehash rentals this is disclosed and audited concentration. i will take a visible 28 percent over an invisible one any day
Leverton already took Hut 8 through a Nasdaq merger, so she knows this exact road. The 9000 Z15 Pro machines arriving Q4 should time nicely with the TUDE listing.
the Z15 Pro delivery timing is the underrated part. machines landing in Q4 right as TUDE starts trading means capacity already deployed, not promised on a slide deck