About SHA-256
SHA-256 is part of the SHA-2 family, published by NIST in 2001. It produces a 256-bit digest (64 hex characters) and remains a cryptographic workhorse — used inside TLS certificates, Bitcoin, file-integrity checks, and many modern password-hashing schemes.
As a plain hash, SHA-256 is not a password storage function: it is too fast. For passwords, always layer a slow KDF (bcrypt, scrypt, Argon2, or PBKDF2-SHA-256) on top.