Merkle Audit Proofs of Certification vs. Ethereum Merkle Proofs

The Merkle Proofs in Ethereum 2.0 is part of the vision to construct stateless clients for Ethereum protocol. It is designed around the paradigm of code merkleization and composition of witnesses. Please find the following note from an article on Ethereum Research blog.

Stateless Ethereum is an initiative to upgrade the current Ethereum protocol to allow for “stateless” client paradigm, in which not all nodes are required to keep a current copy of the state trie. Instead, stateless nodes rely on a “witness” produced by a full state node in order to execute new blocks.

Witnesses are the central conceptual object in stateless discussions, and most stateless research is along two main lines of inquiry:

Witness format and implementation State and Witness data availability