What is Merkle Root in Bitcoin?

Merkle Root is the Backbone of the Blockchain.

If you are involved in the blockchain world, you must have listened to Merkle Tree or Merkle root and felt lost a little bit. But it is not that much complicated. Understanding Merkle root is very important if you want to have a good grasp of Blockchain Technology.

Photo by Luke Richardson on Unsplash

Let’s understand it in simple terms:

• A Merkle tree(Binary Hash Tree) is a data structure introduced by German chancellor Angela Merkle in 1979 that is a fundamental piece of the blockchain.

Merkle Root In Blockchain Explorer

• As we know that blockchain is a decentralised ledger that store data securely and immutably. When we talk about data’s security, Merkle root plays its role efficiently.
• Merkle root is the hash of all the transaction hashes. Every transaction that occurs on the blockchain network has its own unique transaction ID. These transactions ID or hashes are stored in a tree-like structure that means every transaction is linked to its parent transaction until it reaches the single top root hash thus creates the Merkle root.

Merkle Tree Diagram

• As there are several transactions in a block that consume much memory and computing power, it is wise to use a little data to process and verify a transaction and that is what Merkle roots do. Merkle trees take all the hashes of a block as input and turn them into a unique hash of 64 character code as an output that is known as Merkle root.
• The Merkle root is a part of the block header, to verify a particular transaction in a block, there is no need to download all the data of that block, just download the Merkle root and verify the details without downloading that whole data.
• If there are an odd number of transactions on any level of the Merkle tree, the last transaction is copied and hashed with itself. you can see the diagram below-

Merkle Tree (Odd Number Transactions)

Benefits of Merkle Root:

• Verify and transmit data efficiently and securely.
• Need less amount of memory.
• (SPV) simplified payment verification without downloading the whole block.
• All data is recorded in chronological order without altering.
• Very useful for miners and users. Users can verify blocks individually. when Miners receive transactions from their peers, they can calculate hashes progressively.
• Ethereum blockchain uses a modified version of Merkle root called Merkle Patricia Trie. Due to the dynamic nature of the ethereum blockchain, each ethereum block has three Merkle roots with different purposes- transaction root, state root, and receipt root.

I hope this article was helpful and informative. Stay tuned for more blockchain-related articles.

Well, you can also learn about Nonce, It is also the most popular terminology like Merkle Root.

What is Nonce???

Thanks for reading !!