<p>Yes it's a lot faster. For example from one of the core developers:</p>

<p>reddit - Pieter Wuille / 2015-02-19 18:13</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Just did a benchmark on libsecp256k1's current master, without GMP,
  without hand-written assembly, and it's around 3.6x faster than
  OpenSSL on my machine (64-bit code, i7 cpu). When the assembly is
  compiled in (which does not require any extra dependencies anymore),
  it's 4.9 times faster.</p>
</blockquote>

<p><a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2weymr/experiment_bitcoin_core_0100_initial_sync_time/coqghm2">http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2weymr/experiment_bitcoin_core_0100_initial_sync_time/coqghm2</a></p>

<p>This talks about signature verification, which is currently the bottleneck when catching up to the blockchain.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-02-19T18:27:19.573Z
2015-02-19T23:29:33.860Z
2015-02-19T23:29:33.860Z
Jannes
<p>Bitcoin Core is eventually going to replace OpenSSL with libsecp256k1 for all ECDSA operations. As I understand it, this is motivated by wanting consensus-critical rules to not depend on OpenSSL.</p>

<p>Is libsecp256k1 signature verification also faster than OpenSSL? I've heard conflicting information about that.</p>

<bitcoin-core-development><ecdsa><secp256k1><performance><openssl>
Is libsecp256k1 faster than OpenSSL?
Nick ODell
# Is libsecp256k1 faster than OpenSSL?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2015-02-19)

Bitcoin Core is eventually going to replace OpenSSL with libsecp256k1 for all ECDSA operations. As I understand it, this is motivated by wanting consensus-critical rules to not depend on OpenSSL.

Is libsecp256k1 signature verification also faster than OpenSSL? I've heard conflicting information about that.

**Tags:** bitcoin-core-development, ecdsa, secp256k1, performance, openssl


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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2015-02-19. Score: 10 | Accepted answer

Yes it's a lot faster. For example from one of the core developers:

reddit - Pieter Wuille / 2015-02-19 18:13

> Just did a benchmark on libsecp256k1's current master, without GMP,
> without hand-written assembly, and it's around 3.6x faster than
> OpenSSL on my machine (64-bit code, i7 cpu). When the assembly is
> compiled in (which does not require any extra dependencies anymore),
> it's 4.9 times faster.

<http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2weymr/experiment_bitcoin_core_0100_initial_sync_time/coqghm2>

This talks about signature verification, which is currently the bottleneck when catching up to the blockchain.


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