A filing system must decide exactly how each record is written before fingerprinting it.
SEE IT FOR YOURSELF
Build a root and follow one membership proofStep 1 / 4
This example hashes UTF-8 A, B, C and D. The displayed hashes are abbreviated, and the tree uses the playground’s sorted-pair convention.
This example hashes UTF-8 A, B, C and D. The displayed hashes are abbreviated, and the tree uses the playground’s sorted-pair convention.Each pair of raw child hashes is sorted, concatenated and hashed. The resulting parent fingerprints commit to their children.Hash the two parents under the same rule to obtain one root commitment. Changing a leaf changes the hashes on its path.The highlighted siblings are B and hash(C,D). Starting with A, the verifier recomputes its path and compares the final result with a trusted root.
Animated local teaching model. No wallet, RPC or live blockchain data. Some labels and hashes are abbreviated for readability.
Choose the original value
The playground takes a text item such as A. It hashes that item’s UTF-8 bytes, not its displayed hex characters or an ABI tuple.
Compute the leaf digest
Keccak-256 maps those bytes to a fixed thirty-two-byte value. The leaf does not expose the original text as a reversible encoding.
Document preprocessing
Trimming, case folding or normalization can change the bytes. The playground trims each input line; a production protocol must specify its own exact preprocessing rules.
Keep other conventions separate
An allowlist may hash a typed address-and-amount record or use double hashing. Matching the hash algorithm is insufficient if the original leaf encoding differs.