Hello everyone, how you all doing. So I'll be continuing from where I stopped previously. If you've not checked out the piece where I explained what a Hard Fork is, you should definitely check that one out. Tried to do that in a very simple manner, so it's definitely something you should give a read. Go check out the piece right here.

So straight up, let's find out what a Soft Fork is.

A Soft fork in contrast to a Hard Fork occurs when the code is updated, but nodes (participants like miners and co) running the older version still have the power to approve new blocks. Therefore, instead of two different Blockchains (and the creation of a new Cryptocurrency like Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash) being created like when a Hard Fork occurs, the new blocks added to the Blockchain can however still be approved by the older nodes. As time goes by though, all the older nodes might need to upgrade, but they do not compulsorily have to.

So in essence, a Soft Fork is a change in a Cryptocurrency's protocol but it is backward-compatible. Meaning that the non-updated nodes will still possess the ability to process transactions and push new blocks to the Blockchain. So while after a Hard Fork, there are mostly two new Blockchains e.g Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash/ Bitcoin Satoshi Vision and all the other Bitcoins, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic etc, after a Soft Fork the old nodes can still work on the new upgrade. But in a Hard Fork you must migrate or form a new Blockchain.