Fork

A fork in blockchain technology is a modification to the protocol that creates a divergence from the previous version of the network. It can be a soft fork, which is backward‑compatible and allows nodes running the old software to still validate new blocks, or a hard fork, which introduces incompatible changes and requires all participants to upgrade to remain on the same chain.

Forks are important because they enable protocol upgrades, governance decisions, and can lead to the creation of new cryptocurrencies; for example, the 2017 hard fork of Bitcoin produced Bitcoin Cash, while SegWit was implemented as a as