Ansgar Dietrichs

And so Verkle trees were this early Ethereum idea of like, hey, we currently have a Merkle tree.

So like any account in Ethereum is part of this huge,

tree structure and every block, the entire tree is updated.

And, you know, at the roots, you have your balance and you have your, you know, all these individual elements about your account.

The original idea was that transition is over to a more efficient form and it's called vertical trees.

And that was the unfortunate fate that vertical trees had is that they were just never really necessary.

They were always like one of those nice to have features.

Back then, when we were not quite sure, like how aggressive do we want to scale the chain?

How quickly will state growth become a problem?

There were some worlds in which it would have been a more urgent topic, but because we never went down those routes, it was always like right beyond the edge of urgent enough to ever do.

So we never ended up shipping worker trees.

But the nice thing is we now already have a lot of prior work and now we can actually go directly to the next generation of cryptographic structures here.

And so instead of a vertical tree, we're going to something that's basically called the unified binary tree.

It's somewhat similar.

The main difference is that it has a very different kind of like, instead of like a vertical tree is a very wide tree, a binary tree is a very narrow tree.

And the main, I guess, simple set, the main difference is that the binary tree uses a post-quantum secure hash function that is also very efficient to prove.

So it's already basically fitting into this future world that Ethereum is going to, whereas the vertical trees were basically the standalone piece that doesn't quite fit.

But the nice thing is we have a lot of prior expertise.

We have Guillaume, who has been the champion of vertical trees.

And he's frustrated to no end that we never ended up shipping it.