3 Game-Changing Blockchain Hard Forks You Should Know About in 2024
Within the blockchain industry, hard forks are a fact of life and they bring about big changes in the way decentralized networks work. With a hard fork, essentially what happens is that an existing blockchain gives birth to an entirely new one, much like how a fork in the road gives a driver the option to continue along their current route, or follow a new road on an entirely different course.
Hard forks usually occur when some of the developers, or other members of a blockchain community are dissatisfied with certain aspects of the network. The causes vary, but possible reasons to want to fork a blockchain include increasing or decreasing its block size, changing its security mechanisms, adding new features and even reversing fraudulent transactions, as happened with Ethereum shortly after its launch. Today’s Ethereum blockchain is actually a hard fork, while the original blockchain is now known as Ethereum Classic, and they have followed very different paths.
This year, a number of prominent blockchains have undergone hard forks, including EOS, Polygon and Cardano. Let’s take a look at what changes these hard forks have brought and understand the reasons why crypto users should know about them. .
Polygon's zkEVM Hard Fork
Already one of the best known and most popular Layer-2 scaling networks, Polygon has gotten even better with its zkEVM Hard Fork, which introduced what has become known as “Polygon 2.0”.
Polygon’s aim with the zkEVM hard fork is to make Ethereum transactions faster and more affordable, and it does this by integration of zero-knowledge proofs, or ZKPs, into its Ethereum Virtual Machine environment. With Polygon 2.0, the ZKPs are combined with zero-knowledge rollups to enable a greater number of transactions to be processed off-chain, which can then be bundled up together and posed on the Ethereum blockchain for settlement.
The biggest advantage of Polygon 2.0 is its drastically increased throughput and its lower costs. By maintaining EVM compatibility, the Polygon zkEVM can support any EVM-based dApp in this newly scaled environment, without the developer’s needing to make changes or rewrite their codebase. In other words, it brings the speed of zk-rollups to the familiar, developer-friendly EVM environment.
With the hard fork, which went live earlier this year, there are now two Polygon chains – the original Polygon Proof-of-Stake and Polygon zkEVM, designed to cater to different kinds of dApps. Polygon PoS, with its emphasis on scalability and lower fees, is ideal for high-transaction dApps such as social media and gaming, which Polygon zkEVM is better suited to DeFi dApps that need rapid transaction processing and ultra-low costs.
Cardano's Mithril Hard Fork
Another blockchain on a mission to boost scalability is Cardano, with its recent Mithril hard fork also said to increase accessibility to the network.
With the Mithril hard fork, Cardano now creates certified snapshots of its blockchain for developers and dApps to obtain a verified version of the current state of the network without needing to download its full history and verify everything themselves. It’s all about increasing the time it takes for dApps to synchronize with the Cardano network while maintaining its strong security foundation.
Mithril leverages the standard Ouroboros proof-of-stake protocol on Cardano and combines this with a stake-based threshold multisignature scheme to create snapshots of its state. The snapshots can quickly be verified by existing stake pool operators, and are considered valid as soon as a predefined quorum, based on stake quantity rather than user quantity, has been achieved.
The benefits are mostly for dApp developers, resulting in improved node synchronization times. By eliminating the need to download the full history of Cardano transactions, nodes can now syn approximately four-to-six times faster than before, meaning dApps can stay up to date in something approaching real-time.
The Mithril upgrade also minimizes the need for trust between light clients and mobile apps, which currently use third parties to access Cardano’s blockchain data. Traditionally, there has always been a trade-off between security and decentralization, which no longer exists.
Last but not least, the Mithril upgrade brings benefits to stake-based voting and governance. It’s now possible to utilize Mithril signatures for secure and lightweight vote count verification, which can be useful in governance votes that require consensus to be reached faster.
EOS’ Spring 1.0 Hard Fork
In September, the EOS Network announced it had successfully upgraded itself to Antelope Spring 1.0, introducing a new consensus algorithm known as Savanna. It was billed as a monumental upgrade by the EOS community, reducing transaction finality to less than one second, representing a 100-times improvement over earlier iterations of the EOS chain. It dramatically improved the network’s speed, security and scalability, positioning EOS as one of the most powerful mature blockchain networks around.
The benefits enabled by Antelope Spring 1.0 and the Savanna consensus mechanism include much greater scalability, with EOS gaining a much higher network capacity that allows it to handle a vastly higher volume of simultaneous transactions.
The enhanced scalability paves the way for EOS to become a hub for fast-growing dApps looking to scale, and those dApps will also benefit from the improved security enabled by the upgrade, as it addressed a number of existing vulnerabilities on the EOS chain. As another benefit, EOS gained much faster confirmation times and lower fees, meaning dApps can process more frequent transactions in real-time without seeing costs spiral out of control.
In addition, the Antelope Spring 1.0 hard fork introduced new tools and features for developers that will ensure they’re much better equipped to build advanced dApps with instant transaction finality, paving the way for greater innovation in DeFi, blockchain gaming and more.
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