How Merkle Trees Enable the Decentralized Web! by Tara Vancil
Decentralized networks operate without relying on a central source of truth, and instead rely on group coordination in order to establish a shared state. Trust is distributed among participants, so to have confidence that each participant is telling the truth, there must be a mechanism for guaranteeing that participants have not accidentally corrupted or intentionally tampered with the system’s state.
Enter the Merkle tree, a data structure tha