Fortitude, a Zcash miner wholly owned by Digital Currency Group, plans to go public through an all-stock merger with HeartSciences, a Nasdaq-listed medical device company that trades as HSCS. The announcement was confirmed on June 22, 2026 and circulated widely overnight on June 24. The combined business will keep the Fortitude name and is expected to trade on Nasdaq under the ticker TUDE, subject to regulatory approval.
The structure is a reverse merger. Rather than filing for a traditional IPO, Fortitude folds into an existing listed shell with a stock quote already on the exchange. That route has become the default way crypto operators reach US public markets in 2026, and this deal extends it to a category that has rarely had a pure-play listing: privacy-coin mining.
A medical device shell turns into a mining vehicle
HeartSciences built its business around ECG and cardiac screening technology. After the merger, that healthcare unit does not disappear. HeartSciences CEO Andrew Simpson will continue to run it as a business unit inside the combined company. Fortitude CEO Andrea Childs will lead the overall group, with Fortitude's management team taking control. HeartSciences shareholders keep a minority stake.
For HeartSciences holders, the deal repriced the stock immediately. HSCS shares climbed on the announcement, a typical reaction when a thinly traded small-cap becomes the public wrapper for a much larger crypto operation. The market is no longer pricing a cardiac-screening firm. It is pricing exposure to Zcash mining production and, by extension, to ZEC itself.
A vertically integrated Zcash producer since 2019
Fortitude is not a newcomer to the network. The company began mining ZEC in 2019 and has scaled to an annualized output of roughly 157,000 ZEC, or about 366 ZEC per day as of May 31, 2026, according to the deal disclosures. That makes it one of the larger dedicated Zcash producers, and the merger pitches it as a vertically integrated mining platform rather than a holding vehicle that simply buys the coin.
Ownership traces back to Digital Currency Group, the Barry Silbert-led conglomerate behind Grayscale and a long list of crypto bets. DCG putting one of its mining assets onto Nasdaq gives public equity investors a direct way to take a position tied to Zcash without holding the token, custodying it, or running their own hardware. It also gives DCG a liquidity path for the asset.
Timing against a weak tape
The deal lands in a soft market. The broader crypto tape has been under pressure for days, with the Crypto Fear & Greed Index sitting at 21, in "Fear," and Bitcoin trading near $62,910 as of June 24, 2026, down about 1.8% on the day and roughly 4% on the week. ZEC specifically has had a rough month, which makes the announcement a bet on the production engine and the listing premium rather than on near-term token strength.
That gap between a falling token and a rising shell stock is the tension worth watching. A mining equity carries operational leverage to the coin price: revenue scales with ZEC output and the market value of that output, while costs in power and hardware stay relatively fixed. When the underlying coin is weak, that leverage cuts both ways. Investors buying TUDE on the merger pop are taking a view that Zcash recovers, that production holds, and that public-market access is worth a premium over simply buying ZEC on an exchange.
The transaction is targeted to close in the second half of 2026 and still needs regulatory sign-off and a shareholder vote before the TUDE ticker goes live. Until then, exposure runs through HSCS, the existing listing.
Overview
Fortitude, a DCG-owned Zcash miner producing about 157,000 ZEC a year, is going public by merging into Nasdaq-listed HeartSciences and is expected to trade as TUDE in the second half of 2026. Fortitude's team takes control, HeartSciences keeps its cardiac business as a unit, and HSCS shares jumped on the news despite a weak month for ZEC. The deal adds a rare pure-play privacy-coin miner to US public markets and continues the 2026 pattern of crypto firms listing through reverse mergers rather than IPOs.
