Smart contracts are said to be coming this spring to Cardano blockchain. Alonzo testnet will allow developers to write smart contracts and deploy them as dApps. For now only for testing purposes though. The mainnet on the other hand is announced to be launched somewhere around August this year.

Everyone can see that decentralized finance (DeFi) has become extremely popular since last summer. With the smart contracts functionality comes the chance for Cardano to get some slice of the DeFi cake and become actual competition to Ethereum blockchain.

However the true question is... what would happen when smarts contracts become a reality in the Cardano blockchain and the Ethereum is still unable to upgrade itself to 2.0 version? There's clearly some time race set upon these two blockchains. Cardano surely could be very attractive to developers and users alike if it manages to provide the same functionality with lesser fees and better scalability.

After all, users aren't really interested in the backbone of things. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't care whether their favorite application switched from one blockchain to another, as long as it was cheap and convenient to use.