As a crypto investor with a background in blockchain technology, I find this development by Matthias Benkort at the Cardano Foundation truly exciting. The ability to encapsulate an entire blockchain within a single block on Cardano is a game-changer, offering advanced data management and interoperability between blockchains.
Matthas Benkort, Technical Director at the Cardano Foundation and recognized as @KtorZ in the community, achieved an impressive feat by embedding the entire Bitcoin blockchain into a solitary block on the Cardano blockchain. This groundbreaking announcement, communicated via X (previously known as Twitter), has sparked excitement among blockchain enthusiasts, emphasizing the potential for sophisticated data management and seamless interaction between various blockchains.
A Breakthrough For Cardano And Blockchain Technology
Benkort’s groundbreaking discovery was marked by the unveiling of a new open-source library on GitHub named “Merkle Patricia Forestry.” This library equips users with a collection of on-chain and off-chain instruments engineered to operate with Merkle Patricia Tries on Cardano. According to the release documentation, a Merkle Patricia Trie represents a “persistent and authenticated data structure for mapping keys to values.” In simpler terms, it acts as an efficient and secure hashmap.
As an analyst, I would describe it this way: I analyze the documentation and discover that items are stored in a space-efficient trie, specifically a radix 16 trie or prefix tree. The keys’ hash digests serve as directions to their corresponding values within the trie. This method presents various applications, including managing extensive on-chain registries, like domain names, and offering massive oracled datasets comprising intrinsic data, such as a list of delegators and delegatees, or extrinsic data, such as GitHub data related to an ecosystem of projects. It is particularly effective for long-lasting datasets that expand at a leisurely pace, such as those in a Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchain.
The Merkle Patricia Forestry library offers fast addition, removal, and querying of key-value pairs in a vast data set, all made possible through a root hash digest (32 bytes) and compact proofs (less than 1KB). It builds upon optimizations derived from Ethereum‘s Modified Merkle Patricia Trie (MPT), but introduces a unique organization method for nodes as Sparse Merkle Trees. This technique leads to significantly smaller proof sizes, serving as the foundation for the library’s name: Merkle Patricia Forestry.
Benkort elaborated on the compromise between optimized proof sizes and system resources. The library makes a conscious choice to reduce proof dimensions at the expense of some memory and processing power from the CPU execution units. However, it strikes an optimal balance, as evidenced by the performance data in the accompanying documentation tables. These tables present the necessary proof size, memory consumption, and CPU usage for distinct trie sizes, emphasizing the library’s efficiency in various applications.
Detailed Explanation And Demonstration
In a sequence of thorough articles on X, Cardano Foundation’s Benkort offered more information about the library’s intricacies and functions. He clarified that this library has two major components: one constructed in Aiken for custom smart contract functionalities, and another developed in Node.js to handle off-chain processes. This elaborate adaptation of Merkle Patricia Tries, with a distinct innovation, is what Benkort refers to as “Merkle Patricia Forestry.”
“Benkort explained that this data structure is fundamentally an authentic mapping of any key to any value. However, it’s designed in a way that enables performing certain operations using just a tiny portion of the hash and a concise proof, not requiring the entire data structure to be present.”
As a seasoned crypto investor with a solid grasp of blockchain technology, I’m here to share some insights about Merkle Patricia Tries (MPTs). While Merkle Trees are undeniably useful for representing lists and verifying membership through a root hash, MPTs take it up a notch.
As a researcher in the field of blockchain technology, I’ve come across a notable challenge with conventional Merkle Proof Trees (MPTs): the bulky proof sizes, which can reach several kilobytes for extensive data sets. While this isn’t as much of an issue for off-chain procedures, every byte matters significantly on-chain. To tackle this issue, Benkort’s implementation introduces compact Sparse Merkle Trees with 16 items at each level. By incorporating trees within tries, we manage to drastically decrease proof sizes, despite sacrificing some computational steps in the process. This optimization contributes to Cardano’s efficiency improvements.
Benkort showcased this functionality in a recent transaction. In this exchange, a UTxO (Unspent Transaction Output) carrying the root hash of a Merkle Patricia Tree, which encapsulates all Bitcoin block header hashes, was utilized. Compressed into a compact 32-byte size, this transaction underscored the capacity to proceed with the chain by adding a fresh block into the trie. As a result, an authenticated sequence of more than 850,000 blocks was sustained, with only minimal data burden.
Benkort pointed out an unusual aspect of the recent transaction: “This transaction uses a UTxO holding the root hash of a Merkle Patricia Tree, which encompasses Bitcoin block header hashes and their related transactions. Approximately 850,000 blocks are condensed into just 32 bytes.”
To utilize this unspent output (UTxO), it is necessary to present a proof on-chain demonstrating the extension of the chain by adding a new block in the Merkle Patricia Tree (trie). The newly calculated root hash, which is stored on-chain, should represent the earlier chain combined with an additional block. This validation process fits neatly into only 26 lines of code in Cardano’s Aiken.
Future Implications And Use Cases
Benkort emphasized the various uses of this technology, extending from secure interfaces to vast key-value databases operated exclusively on the blockchain. Picture the potential with such extensive data sets, he proposed. “Consider the possibilities: a domain registry, real-time financial market information, or GitHub statistics,” he suggested. “Indeed, I envision a future where institutions or committees share large datasets by simply publishing a root hash on the blockchain, acting as oracles for numerous smart contracts in the future.”
Benkort concluded by looking back on the evolution of this project, which initially took shape towards the end of last year as a personal endeavor. “I’m pleased to finally make it public,” he shared. “Originally, I began working on it near the end of last year as a side project. With so much discussion surrounding this topic recently, I decided to refine and distribute the code. Open sourcing has proven to be an effective choice.”
At press time, Cardano (ADA) traded at $0.455.
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2024-06-03 13:12