Zend\Crypt is a new component in Zend Framework 2 that facilitates cryptography in PHP projects. It supports symmetric and asymmetric encryption, hashing, key derivation functions, and other cryptographic algorithms. Some features include AES encryption, RSA and Diffie-Hellman for public key cryptography, bcrypt for secure password hashing, and PBKDF2 for password-based key derivation. The component provides classes for different algorithms and use cases like encryption, signatures, and password storage.