While the bitcoin hash rate has taken a downward shift during the latter half of last year, Zcash has been on a constant upward movement that could make it a crypto miners refuge.

The reports of Bitcoin miners leaving the crypto mining scene has been doing the rounds since mid-2018 after the crash of 80 to 90 percent in cryptocurrency prices. Bitcoin is down about 82 percent from its all-time high at $20,000 to about $3,500.

Around October, Bitcoin hash rate took a dip and only started upward descent in mid-December. According to Diar’s latest report, cryptocurrency miners are flocking to Zcash due its block reward halving period.

“Cryptocurrency miners have found refuge in solving for Zcash with the block reward still two halving periods behind Bitcoin (Zcash follows the same controlled supply model with differing block times).”

The privacy-focused cryptocurrency, Zcash is a code fork of Bitcoin protocol that uses  zero-knowledge proofs to “enable privacy-preserving transaction data.” It first came into existence in late October 2016. The hash rate of Zcash has been growing on a constant upward movement as can be seen in the 1-year chart above.

“With 7200 ZECs up for grabs daily the networks mining hash rate has been able to sustain a 650% growth as other cryptocurrencies lose equipment in the face of the ongoing bear market and stiff competition.”

Earlier this month, zooko Took to Twitter to share the ongoing developments in Zcash to share that “As expected, the GitHub thread about radically revamping Zcash mining is heating up. https://github.com/zcash/zcash/issues/3672 … It’s important because at today’s prices there is more than $400K/day of new Zcash issuance”

The community is also working on Zcash blossom, a “dual-proof-of-work scheme, where one algorithm is backward compatible with current mining equipment, and another is designed to work well with GPUs on a temporary time scale.”

Harmony mining will be affecting the miners as its goal is to make the Zcash ecosystem more resilient by “spreading issuance and political influence among distinct kinds of stakeholders.”