After the first three planned hard forks of æternity network namely Minerva (March 2019) Fortuna, (June 2019) and Lima (October 2019) the core dev team has been continuously working on improving the network and after those three previously defined updates, this will be the first not previously planned update which changes consensus rules and therefore will be conditioned by a positive community vote.

The whole æternity community has the chance to vote on the Iris Hard Fork, also known as Release 6.0. As with any hard fork, this is an important crossroad in the journey of æternity, and it is essential that as many of us as possible have a say in directing which way our blockchain is going to go.

https://blog.aeternity.com/the-iris-hard-fork-vote-is-live-5a1158c34732