Classic Merkle Trees are cryptographic structures used to manage and securely verify large amounts of data. However, they have a significant drawback: they cannot store folders or files. Merkle DAGs were developed as a solution to incorporate folders and files into Merkle Trees.

 

However, Merkle DAGs require users to download the hash of every other file inside the folder its stored in. This becomes inefficient when dealing with folders that contain large amounts of files. Scionic Merkle Trees exhibit logarithmic growth. This means that as the size of the input (the number of files in a folder) increases, the growth rate of the Scionic Merkle branches decreases.

 

This makes Scionic Merkle Trees an efficient structure for managing large datasets, as the branches become exponentially smaller with the increasing number of files in the folder. In contrast, the number of hashes required to validate a single folder in a Merkle DAG exhibits linear growth. If there are more children (files) in the folder, you must download the hashes to all of them to retrieve a single file. This requirement can lead to the overly large branches Merkle DAGs suffer from that Scionic Merkle Trees aim to resolve.