Most devs just change PoW algo but using Blake-256 which is faster than SHA-256D I performance enhanced the whole wallet by about 3x its why so many can be merged on a server and why it has some compatibility issues with other coins especially the merkle root hash and checksums all Blake-256 vs most coins SHA-256D (PoW algo is just for work on most coins)
Is the signing algo different? AFAIK the slowest thing on the wallets is ECDSA so that should be the first thing to enhance if one is going to make wallets go faster.
The wallet is almost all Blake-256 the checksums are all Blake-256 and wallet uses that a lot for most of the block checking so yes faster yet offers about same security as Bitcoin due the the algo's structure e.g HAIFA