What Is Verkle Tree?
Also known as: Verkle Trie
In short
A Verkle tree is a data structure that, like a Merkle tree, summarizes large datasets but uses vector commitments instead of hashes to produce much smaller proofs. It has been proposed to enable stateless clients on Ethereum.
In a Merkle tree, proving that a piece of data belongs to the tree requires also providing the sibling hashes of every node on the path from that data to the root. Because nodes in Ethereum's current state tree have many children, these proofs take up a lot of space. In Verkle trees, each node summarizes its children with a single vector commitment, and it is not necessary to send all sibling nodes for the proof. This allows the tree to be kept wide and the proof size to shrink significantly.
Small proofs are the foundation of the stateless client idea. If a block carries the state data needed for its execution along with proofs, nodes can verify blocks without storing the entire Ethereum state on disk. This can support decentralization by lowering the hardware requirements of running a node.
Although Verkle trees have been on the Ethereum roadmap, migrating from the current state tree is a complex process and has no finalized timeline. For reasons such as the elliptic-curve-based commitments used not being resistant to quantum computers, alternative designs such as hash-based binary trees are also being discussed.
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