Equihash Explained: What It Is and Why It Matters in Crypto Mining

When you mine a coin like Equihash, a memory-intensive proof-of-work algorithm designed to be ASIC-resistant and fair for GPU miners. Also known as Equihash-BTG or Equihash-200,9, it was created to level the playing field in cryptocurrency mining by making specialized hardware less dominant. Unlike Bitcoin’s SHA-256, which got taken over by massive mining farms, Equihash forces miners to use a lot of RAM instead of raw processing power. This made it possible for regular people with gaming GPUs to still compete—back when that mattered.

Equihash isn’t just a technical detail—it’s a philosophy. It was built to prevent centralization. The algorithm requires miners to store and access huge datasets in memory, something cheap consumer hardware can handle, but expensive ASICs struggle with. That’s why Zcash, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency that launched in 2016 using Equihash as its core consensus mechanism chose it. And why Bitcoin Gold, a fork of Bitcoin created in 2017 to bring mining back to GPUs using Equihash adopted it too. Both coins wanted to avoid the same fate as Bitcoin: a mining landscape controlled by a handful of corporate players with warehouse-sized ASIC farms.

But things changed. As GPU mining became popular, manufacturers started building ASICs that could handle Equihash after all. By 2020, some of those machines were already on the market. Today, Zcash and Bitcoin Gold still use Equihash, but the original promise of decentralized mining is weaker. Some newer coins still try to use modified versions of Equihash—like Equihash-144,5 or Equihash-96,5—to stay ahead of ASICs. But most of them fail. The arms race never really stops.

What’s left now? If you’re mining with a GPU, you’re probably competing against machines you can’t afford. If you’re looking for coins that still value fairness, Equihash is a relic worth understanding—not because it’s still the best option, but because it shows what happens when a good idea meets real-world economics. The posts below cover exactly that: coins that used Equihash, how they fared, and what happened when the ASICs showed up. You’ll find reviews of exchanges that supported these coins, breakdowns of their tokenomics, and warnings about projects that promised decentralization but delivered hype instead.