Explained: What Is a Soft Fork and How Does It Work?

If you’ve got an interest in cryptocurrency, you may have heard of something called ‘forks’. Simply put, a fork is a change in the protocol of a blockchain that has been agreed upon by its participants. 

This can happen for various reasons, and they can be classified into soft forks and hard forks. 

In this article, we’ll be discussing the concept of a soft fork on a blockchain — how it works, how it is activated, a few examples, and how a soft fork is different from a hard fork.

When it comes to Bitcoin, and indeed other cryptocurrencies, a soft fork occurs when the cryptocurrency chain undergoes a ‘temporary divergence’. A soft fork is a change in the software protocol which causes only previously valid blocks or transactions to become invalid.