What is Simplified Payment Verification (SPV)?
Let's find out Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) meaning, definition in crypto, what is Simplified Payment Verification (SPV), and all other detailed facts.
Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) is a lightweight client used to verify crypto transactions on the blockchain. Users can perform peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions while the nodes form the settlement layer.
The concept of simplified payment verification was covered in the Bitcoin whitepaper, published by Satoshi Nakamoto. The recipient of a transaction can prove that the sender has the source funds of the transaction without the need to download the entire blockchain history. SPV can be used to prove instances of fraudulent transactions.
To save the storage required, the SPV only downloads the block headers and sends requests for the proof of inclusion to the blockchain in the Merkle Tree, the cryptographic structure required for data validation.
Every leaf node of the Merkle Tree contains the hash of a specific data block. Each non-leaf node contains the has of the child node labels. Since running a full node via a Merkle Tree would demand more power and storage to download the entire blockchain, SPV is employed to make the process more efficient.
SPVs are used to help the light clients—lightweight wallets that use the SPV mechanism and run on low-end systems—see if a specific transaction was added to the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain.
There are downsides to using SPV over the full node network, particularly those related to network and data security. SPV proofs are more susceptible to 51% attacks and can be utilized to validate falsified transaction data. While there is no solution to such a scenario yet, strategies to mitigate the misuse of SPV are being worked on.