Forks

When developers want to alter the rules and principles that are used for processing transactions or validating data and even when they want to update the consensus rules, they need to fork the blockchain. The ways and methods of forking may significantly differ due to a design architecture and use cases of each blockchain. Nevertheless, the main notions are common. If previous versions of the software are not compatible with newly introduced updates and changes (quite often these are changes in consensus algorithms), it means that a “hard fork” has been conducted. If an older version of the chain still operates with introduced updates, these changes are known as “soft forks”.