Just like calculus, prolly trees have been independently invented at least four times now, under different names and used in different contexts. He's worked with prolly trees, although he calls them "Merkle Search Trees" for reasons that we'll get to. It has all the same properties as prolly trees, although they call their design "Merkle Search Trees" instead. To the best of our knowledge, no one has independently invented prolly trees / Merkle search trees / content-defined Merkle trees since. 2009: Bup Invents Prolly Trees (But Doesn't Name it Anything)This is, as far as I can tell, the earliest recorded use of a prolly tree.