What are Merkle trees?

A Merkle tree is a hash-based cryptographic data structure that allows efficient database verifications to provide data integrity.

Background

The core concept was patented by Ralph Merkle in 1979 and plays an important role in blockchain-based systems.

Components

There are three components of a Merkle tree, which are as follows:

1. Merkle root
2. Merkle non-leaves nodes
3. Merkle leave nodes

How does it work?

• Each non-leaf node is labeled with the cryptographic hash of its child nodes’ labels.
• It continues until the root node has the cryptographic hash of all the nodes.
• Hence, the root node indicates the integrity of the whole data block.

Benefits

• It has data integrity.
• Any change in the data will be detected.
• It has quick verification of blockchain data.
• Quick movement of large amounts of data from one computer node to the other on the peer-to-peer blockchain network.