Verkle Trees form part of Ethereum’s post-Merge roadmap, promising smaller proof sizes and lower hardware requirements for nodes.
Ethereum solo stakers and network nodes stand to benefit from the implementation of Verkle Trees, according to Vitalik Buterin.
The Ethereum co-founder touted the benefits of the technological upgrade to Ethereum’s protocol in an X post. Verkle Trees are anticipated to enable “stateless validator clients”, with Buterin noting its functionality to allow staking nodes to run with “near-zero hard disk space and sync nearly instantly.”
Verkle Trees use similar tree-like structures to Merkle Trees, but a key differentiator is that nodes use a particular type of hash called a vector commitment that is passed to sub-nodes. Vector commitments will provide meaningful, long-term benefits to the Ethereum network.
