Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam recently declared that the virtual currency Ethereum is ahead of bitcoin and represents the future of virtual currency. On his blog, he argued, "There is nothing that bitcoin can do which Ethereum can't."

Ehrsam listed several reasons why he believes Ethereum is outperforming bitcoin. Ethereum's programming languages are less restrictive than bitcoin. Also, the developer tools for Ethereum are more advanced.

Ehrsam also pointed out that Ethereum has a more robust and healthy development team. Bitcoin has become mired in arguments over the block size increase, and some in the community have resulted to mud throwing.

The number of bitcoin transactions is increasing daily, but the actual dollar amount of transactions has not increased significantly, according to Ehrsam. Ehrsam believes the bitcoin community has a false sense of accomplishment while the Ethereum community is pushing for more innovation.

However, Ethereum is far from perfect. For one, it has yet to go through a governance crisis, and its robust programming languages create more opportunities for security breaches. Also, as it grows in value, its rate of progress may slow down.

Ehrsam is uncertain of whether Ethereum and bitcoin will become rivals.

"It’s possible bitcoin remains the protocol that people are comfortable storing their value in because it is more stable and reliable," Ehrsam said in his blog. "This would allow Ethereum to continue to take more risk by trying less tested advancements. In this scenario, bitcoin is more of a settlement network while Ethereum is used to run decentralized applications."

Coinbase will not abandon bitcoin and it will support both bitcoin and Ethereum, according to Ehrsam.