ECDSA has been the preferred signature algorithm for most blockchain networks for verifying ownership and transfer of assets on the networks. However, this complex scheme that has been used in Bitcoin since 2008 started to show its limits. For example difficulties in producing multisignatures and added complexity in second layer Bitcoin networks like Lightning and crhoss-chain atomic swaps. Last year, a proposal called MuSig, or MultiSignature Scheme, was made. It offers many improvements over ECDSA and is probably one the most important cryptographic improvements to Bitcoin that would help increase privacy and efficiency in transactions.

Andrew Poelstra, one of the key researchers and co-author of the paper published a technical overview on this upcoming cryptographic scheme and its applications.

• Read the full article here

Content originally published by BitcoinOptech on newsletter #16.

Introduction

The fifth Scaling Bitcoin conference was held Saturday and Sunday in Tokyo, Japan. In the sections below, we provide brief overviews to some of the talks we think might be most interesting to this newsletter’s readers, but we also recommend watching the complete set of videos provided by the workshop organizers or reading the transcripts provided by Bryan Bishop.

A library has been released for BLS signature aggregation using a construction based on Musig. Musig is a scheme for non-interactive signature aggregation built on the Bellare-Nevan multisignature scheme which makes it possible to create just one public key from multiple public keys.

BLS signatures can be aggregated non-interactively although it makes the process slightly slower. They also have the same aggregation features with Schnorr signatures such as a resulting signature of constant size, reduced data size for easy validation and transmission on networks and high security.

This release is the first draft but is fully functional however it’s not yet reviewed for security.

An other known BLS library can also be found here