Is curl required?

My admin panel is very slow I’ve tried to debug the issue. I nailed it to the function wp_remote_post and an internal error message thrown by curl on this line

return new WP_Error( 'http_request_failed', curl_error( $handle ) );

I wonder what would have happened if I uninstalled curl. Can WordPress use other mechanisms to make http requests or is curl required?

For the record, I have uninstalled curl and wordpress was working on seamlessly.

So I confirm that curl is not a dependency of wordpress.

However, some plugins may require curl.