A fork (an offshoot), as applied to cryptocurrencies, is the creation of a new coin on the basis of an existing project, its source code, or its algorithm, with certain changes introduced. In the Russian-speaking crypto community, a fork most often means exactly such alternative currencies (altcoins), which inherit the technological base of earlier networks but differ in parameters or functionality.

Developers can change a wide variety of characteristics: the hashing algorithm, the block generation time, the size of the reward, the total emission, or additional features. Thanks to the openness of the source code of many cryptocurrencies, launching a fork does not require building a protocol from scratch — a proven solution is taken as the basis.

Examples of forks by algorithm

• coins based on the SHA-256 algorithm are often classified as offshoots of Bitcoin;
• coins based on the Scrypt algorithm historically trace back to Litecoin, which was the first to widely apply this algorithm.

It is important to distinguish a fork as an independent cryptocurrency from a fork as an event within an existing network (a blockchain split). In the first case, we are talking about a new independent project; in the second, about a change of rules within a single chain. The emergence of forks reflects the flexibility of open technologies, but the quality and prospects of each such coin should be evaluated individually.