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Jaime Leverton Steps into Fortitude Mining as Zcash Miner Gears Up for Nasdaq Listing

2026-09-17

Fortitude Mining Holdings—the Zcash mining operation that Digital Currency Group carved out and is now shepherding toward public markets—has brought in Jaime Leverton as CEO starting September 21, 2026. She's replacing Andrea Childs, who moves to chief operating officer to focus on mining ops and infrastructure.

Leverton's got the mining pedigree. She ran Hut 8 from December 2020 until February 2024, shepherding it through a merger with US Bitcoin Corp and a subsequent move into U.S. domiciliation with mining plus high-performance computing operations. More recently she was CEO at ReserveOne, an institutional digital-asset shop. So she knows how to navigate the mining sector's M&A landscape—which matters, because Fortitude is about to become public.

The vehicle is a proposed merger with HeartSciences Inc., a Nasdaq-listed company. The all-stock deal was announced in June 2026 and aims to close in Q4, subject to shareholder sign-off and regulatory blessing. Once it closes, the combined entity will trade under ticker "TUDE" and keep the Fortitude brand. The implied valuation is at least $400 million, though Digital Currency Group intends to keep roughly 95% ownership, with HeartSciences shareholders taking a small piece.

What's behind this? Zcash has surged, and Fortitude's positioned itself well to capture that upside. In the first half of 2026, the company mined 72,696 ZEC—roughly 28% of the network's total production in that period. Q2 revenue came to $20.9 million. The operation runs more than 60 megawatts of capacity spread across seven sites: South Dakota, Nebraska, Texas, and New York.

And they're still building. In July 2026, Fortitude brought a 12-megawatt facility online in Grand Island, Nebraska at competitive power rates. The following month they acquired a 12.5-megawatt facility in Prosser, Nebraska. It's a vertically-integrated play: owned power, self-mining, in-house maintenance. The idea is to nail the cost of capital and keep returns fat.

Fortitude itself was spun out of Foundry—DCG's mining infrastructure subsidiary—in January 2025. The venture uses a selective capital-deployment model across proof-of-work networks but treats Zcash as its main event. The competitive edge is owned infrastructure and long-term power contracts that genuinely move the needle on mining costs.

Leverton's job is to guide this thing through the public markets and beyond. She'll stay as CEO post-merger. The timing—appointing her now as regulatory and shareholder approval processes wind through—signals that DCG is serious about this listing. Whether Leverton can keep the Fortitude momentum going once the deal closes is the open question.

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