The concept of Merkle tree was introduced by Ralph Merkle. A diagram of Merkle tree is shown here. Merkle trees enable secure and efficient verification of large datasets.

A Merkle tree is a binary tree in which the inputs are first placed at the leaves (node with no children), and then the values of pairs of child nodes are hashed together to produce a value for the parent node (internal node) until a single hash value known as Merkle root is achieved.