In cryptography and computer science, a hash tree or Merkle tree is a tree in which every "leaf" node is labelled with the cryptographic hash of a data block, and every node that is not a leaf (called a branch, inner node, or inode) is labelled with the cryptographic hash of the labels of its child nodes. A hash tree allows efficient and secure verification of the contents of a large data structure. A hash tree is a generalization of a hash list and a hash chain.

Demonstrating that a leaf node is a part of a given binary hash tree requires computing a number of hashes proportional to the logarithm of the number of leaf nodes in the tree. Conversely, in a hash list, the number is proportional to the number of leaf nodes itself. A Merkle tree is therefore an efficient example of a cryptographic commitment scheme, in which the root of the tree is seen as a commitment and leaf nodes may be revealed and proven to be part of the original commitment.

The concept of a hash tree is named after Ralph Merkle, who patented it in 1979.

Hash trees can be used to verify any kind of data stored, handled and transferred in and between computers. They can help ensure that data blocks received from other peers in a peer-to-peer network are received undamaged and unaltered, and even to check that the other peers do not lie and send fake blocks.

Hash trees are used in:

Suggestions have been made to use hash trees in trusted computing systems.

A hash tree is a tree of hashes in which the leaves (i.e., leaf nodes, sometimes also called "leafs") are hashes of data blocks in, for instance, a file or set of files. Nodes farther up in the tree are the hashes of their respective children. For example, in the above picture hash 0 is the result of hashing the concatenation of hash 0-0 and hash 0-1. That is, hash 0 = hash( hash 0-0 + hash 0-1 ) where "+" denotes concatenation.

Most hash tree implementations are binary (two child nodes under each node) but they can just as well use many more child nodes under each node.