Data structures and encoding

The Electroneum Smart Chain creates, stores and transfers large volumes of data. This data must get formatted in standardised and memory-efficient ways to allow anyone to run a node on relatively modest consumer-grade hardware. To achieve this, several specific data structures are used on the Electroneum Smart Chain stack.

Prerequisites

You should understand the fundamentals of Electroneum and client software. Familiarity with the networking layer and the Ethereum whitepaper is recommended.

Data structures

Patricia merkle tries

Patricia Merkle Tries are structures that encode key-value pairs into a deterministic and cryptographically authenticated trie. These are used extensively across the Electroneum Smart Chain.

Recursive Length Prefix

Recursive Length Prefix (RLP) is a serialisation method used extensively across the Electroneum Smart Chain.