Cardano Will Have Smart Contracts In Late April Or Early May

The Alonzo testnet, which can bring smart contracts to the Cardano (ADA) blockchain, could go live as soon as April, Charles Hoskinson, CEO of the network’s developer IOHK, revealed during the Cardano360 virtual conference yesterday.

The team the revealed rollout plan, the Alonzo upgrade will available for a hard fork this spring. Initially, smart contracts are going to be available for testing purposes only, with the complete mainnet launch slated for August.

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Hoskinson claimed that the testnet would launch at the top of April or in early May. "For the primary time ever, publicly, people are going to be ready to write smart contracts and deploy them on Cardano," he said.
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The addition of smart contracts marks a serious milestone for Cardano, since it'll finally make the blockchain a viable competitor to Ethereum.

In early March, Cardano’s previous upgrade, dubbed Mary, similarly moved the blockchain much closer to Ethereum by introducing the power for users to make custom tokens. This turned Cardano into a multi-asset network which will potentially support many sorts of different cryptocurrencies.

Unlike Ethereum, however, Cardano doesn’t believe smart contracts for token transactions. this suggests that transfer fees, which still skyrocket on Ethereum, might be much lower on Cardano.