Verkle trees are a more advanced type of Merkle tree, taking up significantly less storage space. In a regular Merkle tree, each non-leaf node stores the hashes of its child nodes.
In a Verkle tree, each node additionally stores a vector of commitments to its child nodes, enabling proof sizes to remain small even with large numbers of leaves. This optimization is particularly valuable within blockchains where storage space is expensive, making Verkle trees integral to scaling solutions in the Ethereum ecosystem.