Blockstream Research has completed a significant maintenance milestone: bringing libsecp256k1-zkp fully up to date with 2.5 years of improvements from upstream libsecp256k1. This library underpins the cryptographic foundation of Liquid Network, its functionary infrastructure, and Elements.

Maintaining Bitcoin's Cryptographic CoreMaintaining Bitcoin's Cryptographic Core

libsecp256k1 is Bitcoin's cryptographic foundation. Every Bitcoin transaction you have ever made relies on this library for signature verification. When Bitcoin Core integrated libsecp256k1 in 2016 (replacing OpenSSL), it delivered 2.5x to 5.5x performance improvements for signature verification, making Bitcoin nodes faster and more secure at validating the blockchain.

Members of Blockstream Research co-maintain libsecp256k1. Jonas Nick (Director of Research) and Tim Ruffing (Cryptographic Engineer) are maintainers of the library that secures the Bitcoin mainnet. Every Bitcoin Core node runs code they maintain to verify ECDSA signatures and, since the Taproot upgrade, Schnorr signatures. This is critical infrastructure work for Bitcoin itself.

However, Bitcoin mainnet is conservative by design. Advanced cryptographic features like Confidential Transactions, multisignature schemes with adaptor signature support, and zero-knowledge proofs do not exist in Bitcoin's consensus rules. That's where libsecp256k1-zkp comes in.

...read more at blog.blockstream.com