Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has backed a warning from Ethereum researcher Justin Drake that rapid advances in artificial intelligence could undermine the cryptography securing today's blockchains before quantum computers do — the scenario often described as "Q-Day."

Writing on X on Wednesday, Drake urged the crypto industry to prepare for "bunker mode," arguing that AI could eventually make it possible to break the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) used to secure cryptocurrency wallets — the scheme whose security rests on the assumption that a private key cannot be feasibly derived from its public key. He said users should begin gradually moving funds into fresh wallets where their public key has not been exposed.

"I don't recommend anyone scramble to move their funds to new wallets today," Buterin wrote on X. "But we should take the risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated math seriously."

Rapid AI gains in mathematics

Drake traced his concern to OpenAI's release on Tuesday of hundreds of new mathematical findings spanning algebra, theoretical computer science and mathematical logic, a display of how quickly AI has been advancing in mathematics.

Last month, the company deployed a team of 10,000 autonomous AI agents working in parallel to solve the Navier-Stokes equation — one of the most famous and difficult unsolved problems in mathematics and physics — in just 88 hours.

"Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen," Drake said on X, adding that elliptic curves could be especially vulnerable to superintelligence.

"Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimize algebraic structure.)" he said.

Buterin flags risks to quantum-resistant cryptography

Buterin extended the concern to lattice-based cryptography — the family of post-quantum schemes at the center of standardization efforts such as those led by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology — warning that systems widely believed to resist quantum attacks could also be weakened by AI-driven mathematical advances.

"So far most people have been in the mode of thinking 'elliptic curves broken, hashes safe, lattices safe,'" he wrote. "But there is a good chance that the concrete security of lattices will take serious hits from the next two years of AI math."

Buterin said this is a major reason why Ethereum's lean roadmap has been moving in the "hash-only" direction.

Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at venture capital firm Dragonfly, also supported taking precautions, describing Drake's warning as "a very sober call."

"The risk is not quantum, but just conventional mathematics overturning unproven cryptographic hardness assumptions," he wrote on X.

Controlled migration to fresh addresses

Alongside longer-term cryptographic changes, both researchers suggested holders could reduce their exposure by keeping funds in addresses whose public keys have not been revealed. In schemes like ECDSA, a wallet's public key generally becomes visible on-chain the first time it signs a transaction; until then, outsiders see only the address, a hash derived from that key.

"My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses," Drake said.

Large and sophisticated crypto holders, he added, should be the first to move their funds to new addresses, and any remaining funds should be shifted to a new address after signing a transaction.

Buterin backed the precaution where it is straightforward to carry out. "If it's not difficult for you, keeping your funds in addresses which have not yet been used to make a transaction is a good idea," he wrote.

He cautioned, however, that moving funds introduces risks of its own. "I personally have lost more money in botched migrations than I have lost in all hacks combined," Buterin said.

Drake similarly stressed that any migration should be gradual and carefully managed, warning that "a rushed migration would do more harm than good."

This article was first reported by Cointelegraph.