The Merkle Mountain Belt
Alfonso Cevallos, Robert Hambrock, Alistair Stewart

TL;DR
This paper compares and introduces Merkle structures optimized for blockchain light client protocols, notably the Merkle Mountain Belt, which is succinct, incremental, and optimally additive, improving efficiency in verifying recent data.
Contribution
The paper introduces the Merkle Mountain Belt, the first Merkle structure that is simultaneously succinct, incremental, and optimally additive, enhancing blockchain light client efficiency.
Findings
Merkle Mountain Belt is succinct, incremental, and optimally additive.
The UMMB variant allows asynchronous client interactions.
Unbalanced structure reduces verification costs for recent data.
Abstract
Merkle structures are widely used as commitment schemes: they allow a prover to publish a compact commitment to an ordered list of items, and then efficiently prove to a verifier that is the -th item in it. We compare different Merkle structures and their corresponding properties as commitment schemes in the context of blockchain applications. Our primary goal is to speed up light client protocols so that, e.g., a user can verify a transaction efficiently from their smartphone. For instance, the Merkle Mountain Range (MMR) yields a succinct scheme: a light client synchronizing for the first time can do so with a complexity sublinear in . On the other hand, the Merkle chain, traditionally used to commit to block headers, is not succinct, but it is incremental - a light client resynchronizing frequently can do so with constant complexity - and optimally additive -…
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Taxonomy
TopicsDistributed systems and fault tolerance · Cryptography and Data Security · Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
