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commonware > Merkle Mountain Ranges for Performant Data Authentication

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Decentralized systems require the ability to prove authenticity of data received from potentially untrustworthy sources. The most well known data structure for this task is the Merkle tree, which allows one to efficiently prove inclusion of an element within a list without having to obtain the entire list from a trusted source. A Merkle tree is a binary tree whose leaves represent the list elements by storing the hash of the element, and whose internal nodes store the hash of their children. The only trusted piece of data required to validate a Merkle proof is a single hash value (~32 bytes) corresponding to the root of the Merkle tree. And the Merkle proof is itself quite small, consisting of a single value from each node along the path from root to the leaf element (logarithmic in the size of the list N) as illustrated in Figure 1. Because of these powerful properties, it's no surprise that the Merkle tree and its variants (such as Ethereum's Merkle Patricia Trie) are fundamental com

commonware > Merkle Mountain Ranges for Performant Data Authentication + ~ - + - + - + - ~ ~ * | commonware * ~ + + - ~ - + - * - + Merkle Mountain Ranges for Performant Data Authentication By Roberto Bayardo February 13, 2025 Decentralized systems require the ability to prove authenticity of data received from potentially untrustworthy sources. The most well known data structure for this task is the Merkle tree , which allows one to efficiently prove inclusion of an element within a list without having to obtain the entire list from a trusted source. A Merkle tree is a binary tree whose leave

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