![]() The Merkle root, through the hashing process, can now be used to verify the leaf nodes (transaction IDs/hashes) at the bottom of the Merkle tree. This is where the final hashing in a Merkle tree takes place and it creates the Merkle root. The last non-leaf node layer will contain two nodes. These non-leaf node layers continue to be hashed together in pairs, creating half as many nodes per layer as the tree narrows on its way up. As a result, the non-leaf node layer above the leaf nodes will have half as many hashes - or nodes - as the leaf node layer. They are called non-leaf because unlike leaf nodes, they don’t contain transaction IDs (or hashes), and instead simply store the hash of the two leaf nodes below it that it represents. These leaf nodes are then hashed together in pairs to create a layer of non-leaf nodes above the leaf nodes. ![]() If you look up a transaction on a block explorer, you’re looking at the transaction hash. These are the transaction hashes - more commonly known as transaction IDs (TXIDs) - of every crypto transaction in a block. When it comes to blockchains, a Merkle tree has three key components:Īt the bottom of the Merkle tree, you have leaf nodes. Unlike the CO2-consuming kind, Merkle trees have their leaves at the bottom and a singular root at the top. Merkle Trees and BlockchainĬomputer science uses the term “tree” to describe anything with a branching data structure. ![]() Without Merkle trees and their associated Merkle roots, the trustless value transfer of blockchains likely wouldn’t have been possible. ![]() Thirty years after the publication of “A Certified Digital Signature,” Satoshi Nakamoto wrote about Merkle trees and even included one of Ralph Merkle’s papers in the references for the Bitcoin whitepaper. In the Bitcoin network, a Merkle root is created by hashing all the transaction hashes together in pairs - producing a unique hash for all the transactions in a block. Named after Stanford professor Ralph Merkle, Merkle trees and Merkle roots were proposed as a new data-verification process in his 1979 paper, “A Certified Digital Signature.” Using one-way functions called hash functions, a Merkle tree - also called a binary hash tree - takes data and hashes it together to create a Merkle root that can serve as a way to verify data in a Merkle tree while using significantly less memory than previous methods. ![]()
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