Cardano gears up for their competition with Ethereum by bringing in smart contracts

Chief Executive Officer Charles Hoskinson of Cardano’s developer IOHK, announced that their new upgrade “Alonzo” will be coming to the blockchain as early as April.

The upgrade marks a major milestone for Cardano as the hard fork will bring smart contracts to the Cardano blockchain and will drastically raise their game in the competition with Ethereum. Initially, smart contracts will be available for testing purposes only, with the full mainnet launch scheduled this August.

Hoskinson made the announcement on Friday during the Cardano360 virtual conference and said that the testnet would launch at the end of April or in early May. “For the first time ever, publicly, people will be able to write smart contracts and deploy them on Cardano,” he confirmed.

By adding smart contracts, Cardano will further position themselves as a force to reckon with as they can now offer similar functionalities to its network that made Ethereum’s decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem boom since last summer. There is currently a widespread total of decentralized of applications (dapps) based on Ethereum smart contracts.

Now, with this functionality, the blockchain’s developers have presented a Cardano-native dapp that allows users to swap different tokens, just like Ethereum’s “killer dapps” such as Uniswap.

With with the launch of Alonzo, Cardano will be able to expand into what currently accounts for a $40 billion market.

Following their March “Mary” upgrade, Cardano already moved closer to Ethereum by introducing the ability for users to create custom tokens. This turned Cardano into a multi-asset network that has the ability to support many sorts of cryptocurrencies.

Cardano has one big advantage over Ethereum and that is that it does not rely on smart contracts for token transactions. Hence, transfer fees, which are skyrocketing on Ethereum, will be much lower on Cardano and this could potentially make Cardano a preferred option over Ethereum.