Abstract-The Distributed Tree Construction (DTC) algorithm is designed for optimally efficient multicast tree construction over structured peer-to-peer networks. It achieves this by creating a spanning tree over the peers in the multicast group, using only information available locally on each peer. Furthermore, we show that the tree depth has the same upper bound as a regular DHT lookup which in turn guarantees fast and responsive runtime behavior. Our DTC algorithm is DHT-agnostic and works with most existing DHTs. We evaluate the performance of DTC over several DHTs by comparing the performance to existing application-level multicast solutions, we show that DTC sends 30-250% fewer messages than common solutions.