Ellipticoin won’t use Merkle trees to store state. That may be blasphemy to the blockchain purest but the goal of Ellipticoin is not to be the most pure. The goal is to make the best tradeoffs necessary to create a blockchain that can support global scale that’s sufficiently decentralized both technically and socially.

The primary reason for making this decision is to optimize transaction processing speed. Changing values at every node of a walk of a tree is going to be slower than changing a single value. While operations on Merkle trees can be optimized they are never going to be faster than using a straight key-value store.

Another benefit of dropping Merkle trees is it makes the implementation of the chain a lot simpler! A considerable amount of time went into researching and building out an implementation of Merkle Patricia trees when we were building Mana. Simpler software runs faster, is more secure and is easier to implement. This will make it easier to create multiple implementations of Ellipticoin! If it’s easier for more people to create and maintain more implementations of Ellipticoin the project will be more socially decentralized.

The most significant drawback of his tradeoff is that Ellipticoin won’t be able to support light clients. If it was possible to support light clients without making significant other tradeoffs that would make sense but that’s not the case.

Regardless of the blockchain if you want the strongest guarantees about security and decentralization you should run a full node. One of Ellipticoin’s goals is to make running a full node more feasible. If running a full node is easy there isn’t as big a need to run a light client.

If you don’t want to run a full node you can still run a zero-client. Zero-clients such as Metamask don’t require Merkle trees to verify transactions. Zero-clients are actually much more commonly used today than light clients. A medium term goal of Ellipticoin is to further decentralize zero-client infrastructure as well. Instead of relying on a single service provider there will be a network of edge nodes that accept transactions.

I’m working on implementing state transitions without Merkle trees now. If I find that it’d be easier or superior in some way to use Merkle trees they can always be added back.