Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake has urged the cryptocurrency industry to prepare for a potential breakthrough in artificial intelligence that could undermine the cryptography securing major digital assets, warning that a worst-case scenario could emerge within months rather than years.

Drake said advances in AI-driven mathematics had raised the risk that the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) — used by Bitcoin and Ethereum to secure transactions — could be broken before sufficiently powerful quantum computers become available. He described the prospect as grounds for the industry to begin planning for what he called “bunker mode,” and recommended a controlled migration of funds to fresh wallet addresses whose public keys have not been exposed through previous transactions. Large and sophisticated holders should be prioritized, he said, and funds remaining in an address after it signs a transaction should themselves be moved to a new address.

The distinction between used and unused addresses is central to the warning: an address that has not signed a transaction keeps its public key hidden behind a hash, while signing can expose the key needed to authorize transactions. The proposed migration is therefore intended to reduce exposure while the industry evaluates longer-term cryptographic changes, rather than to address a demonstrated attack already affecting wallets.

A Call for “Bunker Mode” and Fresh Addresses

The warning followed the release by OpenAI of hundreds of mathematical findings, which Drake said highlighted the accelerating ability of AI systems to solve problems that had long challenged human researchers. He argued that elliptic curves could be particularly exposed to new mathematical techniques because of their underlying structure.

In a post on X on October 7, 2026, Drake laid out his recommendations in full:

Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for “bunker mode”. My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash. Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase).

Don’t rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don’t panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets.

IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By “break” I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster).

Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture. In hindsight, May’s unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot.

Yesterday’s OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time?

Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.)

Separately, as Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once.

Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I’ve witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case.

I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11’s “risq list” (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I’ll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026).

Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from “Satoshi’s shield”, i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS.

Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security.

The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I’ll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration.

— Justin Drake (@drakefjustin) October 7, 2026

Buterin: Take the Risk Seriously, but Do Not Scramble

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin backed the need to take AI-driven cryptographic risks seriously but cautioned users against rushing to move their funds. Buterin said unused addresses that have not sent transactions provide additional protection because their public keys remain hidden, while warning that poorly executed migrations could themselves result in losses.

In his own post on X, also dated October 7, 2026, Buterin wrote:

I don’t recommend anyone scramble to move their funds to new wallets today. But we should take the risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated math seriously, and minimize our exposure to not just quantum-vulnerable cryptography, but also potentially AI-vulnerable cryptography. The core new area of risk from this viewpoint is, unfortunately, ML-DSA / FHE / lattices. (and it’s also another reason, along with quantum, why ECDSA might fall even faster than expected, hence the “fresh address” recommendation)

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

The basic threat model is: factoring is something that naively takes 2^(n/2) time, but over decades smart people have found and optimized number field sieves, and degraded that to 2^O(n^(1/3)), which is why RSA keys and signatures need to be ~400 bytes (and not 64 bytes). What if there are skeletons in the closet like that, both for elliptic curves and lattices, that we are simply not smart enough to discover – but bots soon will be?

This is a major part of the reason why for the past year ethereum’s lean roadmap has been going in the “hash-only” direction: no lattices, no ML-DSA, no Falcon, no lattice-based commitments inside ZK proofs, etc. Signatures in lean ethereum are all hash-based, either WOTS or SPHINCS-.

For signatures and proofs, we already know how to go hash-only. The bigger challenge is for public-key encryption – and this goes far beyond blockchains. Secure communication, anonymizing protocols, lots of things need public-key encryption.

And unfortunately there are long-standing mathematical theorems showing why public-key encryption cannot be done with hashes alone. You have to have some kind of trapdoor object that has at least one form of usable “structure” – either group theory (incl. isogenies or lattices or code-based or potentially in the future even more newfangled and spooky things (local mixing?). But for anything that has structure, you should assume that AI will make at least some progress in breaking that structure. Here, one reasonable inference is that if you want to make something plausibly long-term secure, multiply the key sizes by 10.

To me that’s a very plausible world and something not at all extreme to predict. If AI will bring us 50 years of math in 2 years, then that 50 years of math may very plausibly include a “naive factoring -\u003e GNFS” level of improvement to our ability to break lattices. In that world, lattices will still exist, but they will have to be significantly bigger to guarantee the same level of safety. And at those new larger sizes, hash-based constructions will beat lattice-based constructions on concrete efficiency in every use case where hash-based constructions are possible at all.

Theoretically, of course it’s possible that hashes are broken too (eg. P = NP would imply that). But I think P = NP is very unlikely. And intuitively, it’s much more likely that a mathematical object has exactly no exploitable structure (like hashes are intended to), than that a mathematical object has exactly ~3 forms of exploitable structure (for elliptic curves: associativity, Schoof, pairings) and not some secret fourth form of structure we have not yet discovered that greatly degrades its security (for elliptic curves, ECDLP and pairing security). Similar for LWE, SVP, RLWE and the zoo of lattice problems.

For this reason, we do not yet see any reason to worry and start padding the byte size of hashes (if we start to worry more, we would pad the round count first before doing anything to the byte size).

Concrete TLDR, my own personal views:

• Hash-based > lattice-based, in those situations where hash-based is possible at all
• For anything lattice-based, be much more paranoid on param sizes. Remember that blockchains are only a small portion of the cryptography story; this point goes far beyond blockchains and applies to eg. access to websites, secure messaging, Tor / VPNs …
• For privacy protocols, strongly favor NOT putting encrypted notes onchain. Instead, send them offchain through some third-party mechanism.
• 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. If it’s easy for you, do it. But be careful about migrations; I personally have lost more money in botched migrations than I have lost in all hacks combined.
• For multisig wallets, doing confirmations offchain is better than onchain, because this way the signatures of signer wallets do not get exposed to the public, so if ECDSA falls to AI much faster than expected, at least the multisig “gracefully degrades” to a 1-of-1 where the 1 is whoever was gathering the signatures – a much better place to be than “anyone can take the money”

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 7, 2026

No Practical Attack Demonstrated

No practical AI attack on ECDSA has been demonstrated, and Drake’s timeline is a worst-case assessment rather than a confirmed prediction. The warning nevertheless highlights a growing concern within the blockchain industry that advances in AI could alter the timetable for replacing cryptographic systems currently considered secure.

Source: BitcoinKE