Kuszmaul

Thanks for posting the abstract. It's $2^{14}$ leaves in the original LaTeX rather than 214, just in case anyone is confused. (It's also $O(\log_k n)$ = O(log n / log k).)

Author of the 2019 paper introducing Verkle Trees here [1]. Super exciting to see this on the front page of Hacker News! As the post explains very nicely, Verkle Trees basically let you save space (typically bandwidth, which can be expensive) by replacing a secure hash with a vector commitment scheme, making the tree shorter and fatter with some branching factor $k > 2$. This saved bandwidth comes at the cost of some extra computation required to generate the Verkle tree and verify proofs of leaf nodes.

As an aside, the Verkle either stands for V(ector Commitment Mer)kle Tree or the more tongue-in-cheek V(ery Short Mer)kle Tree.

A huge thanks to Alin Tomescu, who provided me with this project when I was an MIT PRIMES student in high school. He came up with the ingenious idea of combining a vector commitment scheme with a Merkle Tree. He also has a brilliant blog post on his website explaining Merkle Trees if you'd like more background info [3].

[1] Paper: https://math.mit.edu/research/highschool/primes/materials/20...

[2] Slides: https://math.mit.edu/research/highschool/primes/materials/20...

[3] Alin's Website: https://alinush.github.io/

[4] My website: https://sites.google.com/view/johnkuszmaul