Corporate Actions and Chain Forks

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[1] Both fork types can also be seen as backward-compatible as any given node which wants to verify a blockchain from scratch will have to verify blocks which ran older software than its own (either due to hard- or soft-forks).

[2] A hard fork can either be uncontested or contested, whilst a soft fork, under our definition, can only be uncontested. This does not mean that a proposed soft fork may not cause some governance conflict, although the outcome of that conflict wouldn’t necessarily lead to a new blockchain being created at the moment of the new fork.

[3] Though in cases where the contested fork is over the distribution of the asset in the first place (i.e. the DAO hacker having a large sum of Ether following the DAO hack) this may not apply.

[4] On-chain governance is a system for upgrading crypto assets and blockchains in which code changes are encoded into the protocol and decided by token holder voting.

[5] Off-chain governance is a system by which upgrades to crypto assets and blockchains are coordinated and organized primarily through mailing-lists, forums, & discussions where the governance decision outcomes are generally decided through various signals of different stakeholders (e.g. community sentiment or miner committed hashrate).