Merkle Trees and Merkle Roots Explained
What is a Merkle tree?
The concept of a Merkle tree was proposed in the early ‘80s by Ralph Merkle – a computer scientist renowned for his work on public-key cryptography.
A Merkle tree is a structure used to efficiently verify the integrity of data in a set. They’re particularly interesting in the context of peer-to-peer networks, where participants need to share and independently validate information.
Hash functions are at the core of Merkle tree structures, so we recommend you check out What is Hashing? before proceeding.
