Data Structures and Encoding

Hash Ahead generates, stores and transmits large amounts of data. This data must be formatted in a standard and memory-efficient manner so that anyone can run a node on relatively common consumer-grade hardware. To achieve this purpose, some special data structures are used in the Hash Ahead protocol stack.

Data Structure

Merkle prefix tree

A Merkle prefix tree is a data structure that encodes a given key-value pair into a deterministic and cryptographically verified prefix tree. Hash Ahead makes extensive use of this data structure in its execution layer.

Learn more about Merkle prefix trees

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Recursive length prefix

Recursive Length Prefix (RLP) is a serialization method widely used in the Hash Ahead execution layer.

Learn more about Recursive length prefixes

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