There are more than 1,300 cryptocurrencies available at present, and Zcash is one of the only non-premium ones out there. As with all other cryptocurrencies, Zcash also incorporates a blockchain, a decentralized payment method with no management from an official authority. On cryptocurrency exchanges, Zcash users trade it as ZEC.

Zcash gives users anonymity, and transactions taking place on the network are untraceable. This cryptocurrency shares similarities with Bitcoin, such as being open source, though they have differences too. For example, Zcash offers a higher degree of privacy than Bitcoin does, which makes it more appealing to users focused on maintaining anonymity.

So, let’s move on to discuss ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit). This is a form of hardware used to solve the complex problems arising through coding Bitcoin and alternative cryptocurrencies. The term Zcash ASIC miner applies to a specific ASIC miner customized to mine Zcash specifically, but no other cryptocurrencies.

It wasn’t always this way, though. When cryptocurrencies first started to emerge, users managed to mine them with their own home computers’ CPUs. But as people started to try cryptocurrencies in greater numbers, supply and demand was disrupted. This led to users requiring more powerful computing technology to mine the sheer amount of cryptocurrency available.

As a result, users started to leverage GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) in gaming hardware, as these offer stronger computing power to process cryptographic hashes. But eventually GPUs were discovered to not be as efficient as necessary, and the ASIC miners were put to good use for mining Zcash instead.