What is a Hard Spoon

“Hard spoon: a new chain that takes into account state from an existing chain; not to compete, but to provide broad access.” — Jae Kwon

A hard spoon occurs when a new cryptocurrency is minted by replicating the account balances of an existing cryptocurrency. In our case, the Tendermint team will be proposing a hard spoon of Ethereum by taking the account balances of existing Ethereum holders, replicating those values, and pegging them within our Ethermint VM zone. This means that ETH holders will have their coins replicated in this EVM zone and will be redeemable as fee tokens within Ethermint.

“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.*” — Vitalik Buterin

Critically, a hard spoon is non-contentious. We do not want to compete with or take market share from Ethereum. However, with this hard spoon, we do intend to invite the Ethereum development community onto our platform, as we offer performance boosts that complement, not usurp, Ethereum.