The most notable changes are:
- Addition of a new Silent Payments (BIP-352) module with support for sending and scanning on full nodes.
- Addition of a function for overriding the internal SHA256 compression, useful for plugging in hardware-optimized SHA256 implementations.
- Performance improvements in the 64-bit field element implementation, leading to significant speedups for many library functions on GCC and MSVC builds (e.g., up to ~11% for ECDSA and Schnorr signature verification).
- Removal of the previously deprecated symbols
secp256k1_schnorrsig_sign(in favor ofsecp256k1_schnorrsig_sign32) andsecp256k1_context_no_precomp(in favor ofsecp256k1_context_static).
For a more detailed list of changes, see the CHANGELOG.md.