Merkle tree

Merkle trees and their variants provide integrity property to data blocks and play a crucial role in modern cryptographic systems. The integrity property ensures that tampered information can be detected. They offer a robust mechanism for data verification and integrity across various applications, including blockchain and cryptocurrencies, distributed systems, file systems, and version control systems. Merkle trees depend on the properties of an underlying selected cryptographic hash function, for example, SHA-3. Security and efficient operations are prerequisites for Merkle tree applications, leading to the development of variants of Merkle trees.