Verkle trees are shaping up to be an important part of Ethereum’s upcoming scaling upgrades. They serve the same function as Merkle trees: you can put a large amount of data into a Verkle tree, and make a short proof (“witness”) of any single piece, or set of pieces, of that data that can be verified by someone who only has the root of the tree. The key property that Verkle trees provide, however, is that they are much more efficient in proof size. If a tree contains a billion pieces of data, making a proof in a traditional binary Merkle tree would require about 1 kilobyte, but in a Verkle tree the proof would be less than 150 bytes - a reduction sufficient to make stateless clients finally viable in practice.
Verkle trees are still a new idea; they were first introduced by John Kuszmaul in this paper from 2018, and they are still not as widely known as many other important new cryptographic constructions. This post will explain what Verkle trees are and how the cryptographic magic behind them works. The price of their short proof size is a higher level of dependence on more complicated cryptography. That said, the cryptography still much simpler, in my opinion, than the advanced cryptography found in modern ZK SNARK schemes. In this post I’ll do the best job that I can at explaining it.
Read in full here:
https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/06/18/verkle.html
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