The point of scrypt is to utilize the commodity hardware to the max. Commodity hardware gives you a lot of memory IO for the buck. You can't spend the same dollars and get 100x more IO on an ASIC. But you can spend the same dollars and get 100x (actually even more) faster at typical hashes like SHA256.

The point is to cut down on an attacker's possible advantage by using specialized hardware. Scrypt uses memory IO so that you can "get your money's worth" by running it for 100ms on an Intel CPU.

This is old-school thinking and a defensive play at trying to prevent offline attacks. The idea is impose a run-time cost on each attempt to verify a password. Defender spends it every time they try to log someone in. Attacker spends it for every guess at trying to crack a password.

The new approach (well I'm quite biased since I founded a company that does this) is to add a one-time cost which is unbounded and does not impose run-time latency.

We do this with a large amount of random data. Many TBs or perhaps as much as a PB. The salted hashes are entangled with the data pool with a simple API, in such a way that an attacker would need to steal the entire data pool to run an offline attack. Stealing only part of the data pool does not let you crack any passwords, even if they are trivially simple.

The bigger the data pool, the easier it is to defend, and the faster the system runs and more hashes/second it supports. So, is essence it's high performance scalable security that actually stops offline attacks even after the site is breached.

You use this new approach as an additive layer on top of the existing scrypt hashing that you are already doing.