OmiseGo and Cosmos announced a few days ago that they will perform a hard spoon based on a hard fork. From the investor’s point of view, the hard spoon differs from a hard fork in that token holders receive two free tokens. For the crypto currency OmiseGo, as well as for Ethereum, however, there is much more behind the spoon. The development of the plasma scaling solution has progressed so far that this step became necessary.

But first things first. According to Cosmos’ Jae Kwon, investors in Ethereum and OmiseGo (OMG) can be twofold pleased:

OMG and Cosmos have decided to start f̵o̵r̵k̵i̵n̵g spooning…hard. That’s right, you get a token, you get a token, everybody gets two tokens!

Without going into the technical details, the process can be explained as follows: The hard spoon takes the balances of two given tokens in the existing block chains and duplicates these two account balances to a new block chain.

Here is a detailed explanation of hard spoon.

In the case of OmiseGo, the OMG token balances are duplicated to the Tendermint blockchain. The Cosmos network will spoon Ethereum by duplicating the account balances of Ethereum owners to the new blockchain. Thus, Ethereum owners will also benefit from the Hard Spoon.

Background and technical details

Introducing the blog post on medium Vitalik Buterin describes the process of hard spoon, in a few words, as follows:

A hard spoon is a meta-protocol on top of a blockchain creating a token that inherits the blockchain’s underlying token’s balances. The idea of a soft spoon would be to create two competing *branches of a protocol* within *the same blockchain.

The hard spoon is necessary because the development of the Ethereum scaling solution Plasma, which is supposed to process millions of transactions per second, is already much more advanced than previously planned.

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Originally, according to OmiseGo’s roadmap, the second of five milestones, Honte, was to be integrated with the Tendermint blockchain. This is currently being developed by the Tendermit team and should provide the basic mechanisms for proof-of-stake and sufficient transaction throughput for an initial implementation of the OmiseGo Decentralized Exchange (DEX).

As soon as plasma has reached an equivalent development stage, tendermint should be replaced by plasma. Tendermint was planned as an interim solution because the OMG team expected a longer development time for plasma. However, as plasma development is expected to be very advanced, OmiseGo says it makes no sense to focus the team’s resources on developing the Tendermit solution.

As a result of this development, the hard spoon must take place, as the Tendermint team will continue its development and develop its own new blockchain. The plasma and tendermint teams want to continue to support each other and “look forward to healthy competition”. When will the Hard Spoon be released is still not known. However, a timely announcement should be made at least two weeks in advance.

What happens next for OmiseGo?

Simply put and just to make it clear again, OMG remains OMG. The Ethereum blockchain, which is to be upgraded to plasma this year, will remain the future basis for the OMG token.

Tesuji is to be the next, fourth milestone according to the roadmap, which the team will now begin to work on. When the Tesuji milestone is reached, OmiseGo and its DEX will support plasma transactions for both ETH and ERC20 token deposits and withdrawals, as well as swaps between these tokens.

The release date should be “in the next two quarters”. An update of the roadmap and details on Tesuji will be published in the coming weeks.

From our point of view, the great progress in the development of the scaling solution Plasma for Ethereum is particularly encouraging news.