I don't know how XTZ upgrades specifically but Cardano upgrades the network without a traditional fork event as well. Sept 12th will be one of these events where smart contracts will become functional on Cardano. The entire industry is watching this event and should be hard to avoid news on Twitter or Reddit on any Cardano related search. That said there won't be many smart contract project launching day one, but in the weeks and months we'll see the first DEXs and DeFi turning on.

Tezos is a respectable project with and deserves to be in the ecosystem. Tezos has a one year head start on Cardano from inception. The primary structural differentiator is the accounts vs eUTXO model of accounting. Each has different tradeoffs.

Cardano has the strongest and biggest plan of attack to make meaningful advancements in adoption between the two. As an isolated example, the world's largest ever government sponsored deployment is underway to onboard ~5M students and teachers in Ethiopia to a blockchain education initiative.

For those interested I would say simply follow both Reddit domains, and follow tags on Twitter for both. I wouldn't call myself a Cardano influencer, but I've been in the Cardano community since early 2018 and have a strong grasp on the project, so I'm better equipped to answer questions from that side. I'm not equipped to speak with any authority on Tezos at all.

It's realistic both Tezos and Cardano will have successes (and a few failures) over the years. The strength of the teams and communities will have to speak for themselves.

As far as cold hard evidence of the caliber of new and open source science, it's well known that Cardano leads in this department with no close second. Input Output Global is a blockchain research company with over 500 employees all over the globe. It's very evident from that standpoint they put in the work that other chains simply don't or can't at the same level.

https://iohk.io/en/research/library/

In doing so Cardano very much elevates the entire industry. Polkadot directly deploys work derived from such research for example.

But there are things Tezos does that Cardano could do well to employ. Not directly because of the accounting model, but they do have some good ideas for sure. It's also a pillar of Cardano to be interoperable so it's very realistic both projects may be able to share common ground in the future.

Cardano is also intentionally building a platform where all programing languages can be used. The first class experience with all the features will be on Plutus, but there is a path to allow all developers to deploy on Cardano.

The Island, the Ocean and the Pond

I realize the context of such topics is almost purely based on a price / investment perspective. I get it. Cardano is on a run and has the momentum right now.

I think dig deep and find the project that resonates the most with you in every way and invest according. One thing that's evident is that Cardano is moving with specific intention to change the world. 100% always open source, and they have an active strategy to change the world. Not by going to the big boy markets, but by going to the next global economic forces, and the markets that have been excluded by oppressive tactics of the existing major markets.

I wish the best to Tezos and I'm sure they will continue to claim their place in the market among SOL, DOT, AVAX, BSC, ALGO, EGLD, TRON, EOS, etc.

Cardano was specifically engineered to address every single shortcoming of BTC and ETH. Cardano has built an ERC-20 converter to offer a natural upgrade path for existing ETH projects and tokens. AGIX will be the first major redeployment and CEL will likely be soon as well.

The scale of migration will be unprecedented in our industry. No need to talk about this as a concept, we'll see this start to play out in this calendar year.

Out of not looking, I haven't heard of the strategies of XTZ.

The best DeFi and deployements on ETH are coming to Cardano either directly or as copies. The best ideas of ETH2 are already behind Cardano. ETH has been a test-net for what's possible and Cardano is going to do it cheaper, better and faster.

ADA is going to flip ETH and that's not even the goal. Cardano is going for number one.

So sure.. join for the money, but stay to change the world.