In the cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, a soft fork is a change in the software protocol where only previously valid transactions are made invalid. It is different from a hard fork that requires all nodes to upgrade and agree on the new version. In a soft fork, it only requires a majority of the miners upgrading to enforce the new rules. Whenever there is a new transaction, then that can be added as a soft fork which will only require the participants (that is the sender and the receiver) and miners to understand the new transaction type. A soft fork can also be seen, during a temporary divergence in the blockchain when miners using non-updated nodes violate consensus rules their nodes don't know about.
Soft forks have been widely used on the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain among others to implement the new upgrade functionality. Soft fork always needs a hard fork to be reserved since a soft fork, by definition only allows the set of valid blocks to be a proper subset of what was valid pre-folk. If you want to know more about what is a soft fork or anything related to it, then visit Cryptoknowmics website for more information on this. Cryptoknowmics is your one-stop solution for every query related to the cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
