Combine two fixed-width digests under an explicit rule.
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Two record fingerprints form the input for one parent fingerprint.
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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.
Use complete child hashes
Each child digest has thirty-two bytes. Concatenating two children therefore gives sixty-four input bytes before applying the parent hash.
Apply the chosen ordering
The local tool sorts the two hash values before concatenation. This makes the pair operation commutative, unlike a position-sensitive left-then-right convention.
Hash bytes rather than labels
Displayed abbreviations such as abcd…1234 are only labels. The calculation uses the complete child bytes and does not include an ellipsis.
Reuse the rule consistently
Building and verifying must use the same pair operation at every level. One unsorted step can produce a different root.