What Is the Difference between “Soft Forks” and “Hard Forks” in Blockchain Governance?

A soft fork is a backward-compatible protocol upgrade, meaning old nodes that have not upgraded will still recognize new blocks as valid, although they may not fully validate the new rules. A hard fork is a permanent, non-backward-compatible change that requires all nodes to upgrade.

If a hard fork occurs, it splits the blockchain into two separate chains with different rules, and nodes on one chain will reject blocks from the other.