Schnorr signatures

Schnorr signatures are digital signatures that provide similar security to the ECDSA scheme used since Bitcoin’s original implementation, but which provide other benefits. They were added to Bitcoin as part of the taproot soft fork.

Schnorr is secure under the same cryptographic assumptions as ECDSA and it is easier and faster to create secure multiparty signatures using schnorr with protocols such as MuSig. A new signature type also provided an opportunity to change the signature serialization format from BER/DER to one that is more compact and simpler to implement.