Forks occur naturally as a product of the leader rotation described above. Nodes take turns being leaders and generating the PoH that encodes state changes. The cluster can tolerate loss of connection to any leader by synthesizing what the leader would have generated had it been connected but not ingesting any state changes. The possible number of forks is thereby limited to a "there/not-there" skip list of forks that may arise on leader rotation slot boundaries. At any given slot, only a single leader's transactions will be accepted.