Making PHP Viable for Blockchain Development
PHP is rarely used for blockchain applications, and for good reason: pure PHP implementations of secp256k1 ECDSA operations are prohibitively slow. Signing a single transaction can take 90-136 milliseconds—far too slow for production cryptocurrency wallets or blockchain nodes.
But what if we could make PHP 2,500-3,000× faster at cryptography?
The Challenge
Secp256k1 is the elliptic curve used by Bitcoin and Ethereum for signing transactions. It requires complex mathematical operations:
- Point multiplication on an elliptic curve
- Modular arithmetic with 256-bit integers
- Secure random number generation
PHP, being an interpreted language, struggles with these operations. The best pure PHP implementation (kornrunner/secp256k1) takes:
- 90-136ms per signature
- 100-135ms per verification
- No support for public key recovery
For context, a blockchain node processing 1,000 transactions per second would need:
- Signing: 90-136 seconds in pure PHP
- Verification: 100-135 seconds in pure PHP
That's 2-4 minutes per second of transactions. Clearly impractical.
The Solution: C Extension
By wrapping the official libsecp256k1 library (used by Bitcoin Core) in a PHP extension, we achieve:
- 0.03-0.06ms per signature
- 0.04-0.06ms per verification
- Full support for public key recovery (Ethereum-style)
That's 2,400-3,000× faster than pure PHP.
Performance Benchmarks
| Hardware | Operation | C Extension | Pure PHP | Speedup |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intel i3-2130 (2011) | Sign | 0.045 ms | 112.9 ms | 2,509× |
| AMD Ryzen 7 3700X | Sign | 0.030 ms | 89.6 ms | 2,987× |
Real-world impact:
- 100,000 signatures: 3-5 seconds (C) vs 2.5-3 hours (PHP)
- 1,000,000 signatures: 30-45 seconds (C) vs 25-31 hours (PHP)
Implementation Details
The extension provides three functions:
// Sign a message hash
$signature = secp256k1_sign($messageHash, $privateKey);
// Returns: r (64 hex) + s (64 hex) + v (2 hex) = 130 characters
// Verify a signature
$isValid = secp256k1_verify($messageHash, $signature, $publicKey);
// Returns: true or false
// Recover public key (Ethereum-style)
$publicKey = secp256k1_recover($messageHash, $signature);
// Returns: 128-character hex (X + Y coordinates)
Ethereum Address Derivation
// Complete Ethereum workflow
$messageHash = keccak_hash($transactionData);
$signature = secp256k1_sign($messageHash, $privateKey);
$publicKey = secp256k1_recover($messageHash, $signature);
$address = '0x' . substr(keccak_hash(hex2bin($publicKey)), -40);
Security Features
- Thread-safe: Uses pthread mutex for ZTS compatibility
- Context randomization: Uses OpenSSL's CSPRNG on initialization
- Secure memory: All private keys and hashes are zeroed after use
- Battle-tested: Wraps libsecp256k1 from Bitcoin Core (production since 2015)
Real-World Applications
With this performance, PHP becomes viable for:
- Cryptocurrency wallets: Sign transactions in real-time
- Blockchain nodes: Process thousands of TPS per node
- dApp backends: Server-side transaction signing
- Payment APIs: High-throughput Bitcoin/Ethereum processing
- Authentication systems: ECDSA-based login
Blockchain Node Performance
With this extension, a single PHP process can:
- Sign ~33,000 transactions per second
- Verify ~18,000 signatures per second
- Combined throughput: ~16,600 TPS
This makes real-time blockchain implementations in PHP feasible, including gaming blockchains with sub-100ms block times.
Installation
# Install dependencies
sudo apt-get install libsecp256k1-dev libssl-dev php-dev
# Build extension
git clone https://github.com/BuildCoreWorks/php-secp256k1.git
cd php-secp256k1
phpize && ./configure && make && sudo make install
# Enable extension
echo "extension=secp256k1.so" | sudo tee /etc/php/8.1/mods-available/secp256k1.ini
sudo phpenmod secp256k1
Try It Yourself
Full benchmarks, documentation, and code examples are available on GitHub:
https://github.com/BuildCoreWorks/php-secp256k1
Combined with our php-keccak256 extension, PHP developers now have complete, production-grade cryptography tools for Bitcoin and Ethereum development.
Conclusion
By leveraging C extensions for cryptographic operations, PHP transforms from "too slow for blockchain" to a viable platform for production cryptocurrency applications. The 2,500-3,000× performance improvement isn't incremental—it's the difference between impossible and practical.
This opens new possibilities:
- Building blockchain nodes in a language millions of developers know
- Rapid prototyping of cryptocurrency applications
- Enterprise blockchain solutions using existing PHP infrastructure
- Educational blockchain projects with accessible technology
The extension is open source (MIT licensed) and production-ready. We're using it for a PHP blockchain implementation capable of real-time transaction processing.
Try it out and let me know what you build with it!
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