Understanding Merkle Trees: a Rust Implementation with Blockchain Examples

You have probably seen Merkle trees mentioned in blockchain or distributed systems contexts. But most explanations are frustratingly generic: they never really show how Merkle trees work or why they are needed in the first place. I decided to dig a bit deeper and as a result I built a simple implementation of a Merkle tree in Rust with some examples (including the Simple Payment Verification as it is used in blockchains) and wrote a blog post that explains the algorithms and data structure with