Application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners are computers designed for the sole purpose of mining cryptocurrencies that are created through proof of work. Under this system, whenever a new block of information needs to be verified and added to a cryptocurrency's blockchain, it's encoded with a complicated puzzle that a computer needs to solve. Whoever solves the problem first gets to update the blockchain with the new information and is awarded a certain amount of cryptocurrency. Theoretically, any computer can be used to solve these puzzles. However, because proof-of-work mining is essentially a race, the people with a greater hash rate — a measure of the calculations that can be made per second — are more likely to solve the puzzle first. So ASIC miners were created to increase cryptocurrency miners' hash rates.