A recent test by Casa co-founder Jameson Lopp revealed that enabling the GLV Endomorphism implementation for Bitcoin Core can make the network faster and more efficient by several notches.
Lopp tweeted Monday, “I ran 4 different syncs of Bitcoin Core to benchmark the real-world performance improvements offered by enabling GLV Endomorphism. The results were better than expected!”
He noted that the default synchronization speed during his tests increased by over 18%, while full verification of all historical signatures was 28% faster.
GLV Endomorphism — first proposed back in 2011 by Bitcoin developer Hal Finney — made a comeback last week after a patent that had previously complicated the protocol’s utilization in the Bitcoin code expired on September 26th, 2020.
The implementation of GLV Endomorphism would allow Bitcoin full nodes to verify signatures using a different mechanism in order to accelerate transaction synchronization. It would also speed up the initial block download that is required when the Bitcoin Core client is launched for the first time and reduce CPU usage while validating newly broadcast blocks and transactions.
As the BTC Times reported last week, the feature had already been rigorously tested throughout the development of the libsecp256k1 library, making the optimization just as well-tested and mature as any other part of the library.
GLV Endomorphism is expected to ship with Bitcoin Core’s next release.