Merkle Trees and Hash-Based Many-Time Signatures: Practical Multi-Signature Using One-Time Keys
This article explains how to build practical many-time digital signatures from one-time signature (OTS) schemes using hash functions and Merkle trees. It outlines the naive approach of deploying many OTS keypairs (one per message), then describes optimizations: deriving private OTS keys from a single seed with a PRNG to avoid storing many private keys, and compressing the public key set into a single root using a Merkle tree. In the Merkle-signature scheme, each OTS public key is a leaf; the global public key is the tree root. A signature consists of the OTS signature, the OTS public key, the leaf index (state), and a short authentication path (a sequence of sibling hashes) that recomputes the root. The article highlights that this produces a stateful many-time signature scheme that keeps verifier work and storage low while preserving security based on hash functions. Primary keywords: hash-based signatures, Merkle trees, one-time signature, many-time signature. Secondary/semantic keywords: authentication path, PRNG seed, stateful signatures, public key compression.
Neutral
The article is technical and educational rather than market-moving: it explains a cryptographic construction (Merkle-based many-time signatures) that underlies some post-quantum and blockchain-related signature schemes. There is no immediate product launch, protocol upgrade, funding event, or vulnerability disclosure that would directly change asset prices. For traders, this content is neutral — it may gradually increase confidence in hash-based signature schemes’ practicality, which is mildly positive for projects adopting them, but such effects are long-term and diffuse. Historically, cryptography research or design explanations without concrete deployment or security incidents produce little short-term price movement. Short-term: neutral impact — unlikely to trigger trading flows. Long-term: modestly bullish for ecosystems that standardize and adopt secure hash-based signatures (e.g., post-quantum transitions), but only if followed by implementations, audits, and integrations.