From the official announcement:
GitHub now automatically computes and displays SHA256 checksums (digests) for all uploaded release assets. These digests are generated at upload time, immutable, and let you verify that downloaded assets haven’t been altered since publishing. This improves integrity and transparency for every release.
In short, GitHub's Releases REST API now includes generated checksums for every asset. This would be incredibly useful to have in lastversion --format json or lastversion --format assets since it can help mitigate man-in-the-middle attacks and identify corrupted/damaged asset downloads.