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.