The gist is that Parent blocks in Merkle DAGs can become very large. If there’s 10,000 files in a folder, that parent block has 10,000 hashes. You have to download a whole parent block to get a leaf underneath it.. this creates bloated branches. We replace a parent block with a classic merkle tree, so we chop the size of a parent block down logarithmically… Instead of downloading all 10,000 hashes in a parent block, we only need around 15 hashes now to retrieve any leaf with a branch. This creates the slimmest Merkle DAG branches in history. View quoted note →