What is soft consensus?

Most, if not all, blockchains focused on the creation of DApps today such as Ethereum are based around the idea of smart contracts. DApps running using smart contracts have their transactions verified by each node in the network. But this method is not the only way; not every node in the network has to verify every transaction for each DApp even if it doesn’t apply to them. When a transaction is not verified by every node in the network, but only the ones who use the DApp that the transaction applies to verify that transaction, soft-consensus occurs.

To use an analogy, the most adopted internet data transfer protocols (such as UDP) don’t try to do anything special with the data that is being sent. These protocols let the two users who are communicating verify, authenticate, etc their own data. Not everyone on the internet authenticates and verifies every data packet; it’s just not feasible.Similarly, not everyone on a blockchain has to verify and authenticate every data packet. Ethereum is trying to introduce unneeded complexity to the problem of creating DApps by requiring that every user has to verify every transaction in every DApp, and it’s already hitting a scalabililty barrier partly because of it.

Anything that a smart contract can do can be done with soft-consensus, and soft-consensus can actually do much more. A soft consensus DApp is easy to hard fork without forking the main ch

ain it runs on, and it has easy support for virtual operations (when a DApp creates a transaction that will execute after a certain amount of time), which Ethereum and most smart contract blockchains do not have