Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake spent years warning that quantum computers could one day crack the cryptography securing cryptocurrencies. Now he says artificial intelligence may get there first—and he wants the industry ready.

"Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for 'bunker mode,'" Drake wrote on X on Wednesday. His recommendation is a controlled, mass migration of funds to fresh addresses that have never signed a transaction—addresses whose public keys remain hidden behind a hash.

Drake urged holders not to panic or rush, noting the migration could be carried out gradually and starting with the largest holders. He also said he would push to accelerate Ethereum's shift to hash-based cryptography.

The concern centers on ECDSA, the digital signature scheme Bitcoin and Ethereum use to prove that a transaction was authorized by the right private key. When a wallet signs a transaction, its public key becomes visible on-chain. If ECDSA were broken, an attacker could work backward from that public key to the private key and drain the wallet. Funds held at addresses whose public keys have never been exposed are considered safer, because the keys stay hidden behind a hash. Because both networks lean on this one signature standard, the scenario is an industry-wide exposure rather than a single-chain problem—which is why his appeal runs from individual holders to major custodians.

Drake said it is now reasonable to prepare for ECDSA breaking before Q-Day—the moment quantum computers become powerful enough to crack today's encryption—"in the worst case in months not years." By "break," he meant recovering a private key in roughly a week on available hardware, such as a large GPU cluster. His remarks place AI-driven progress, rather than quantum hardware alone, at the center of the near-term risk.

He pointed to a burst of AI-driven mathematics, including 722 results OpenAI published Tuesday, as a sign that long-held cryptographic assumptions are falling. "Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence," he wrote, arguing that their rich mathematical structure leaves room for clever attacks that hash functions are designed to resist.

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…

— Justin Drake (@drakefjustin) October 7, 2026

Drake stressed that holders should not rush or panic, emphasizing that moving assets requires no new cryptography or new wallets. He urged Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether to harden their cold storage—a notably practical request, since the migration he describes means moving coins, not deploying new technology.

He also noted that wallets holding less than 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from what he called "Satoshi's shield": roughly 20,000 exposed addresses tied to Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, each holding 50 BTC, which would likely be targeted first.

The warning marks a sharp escalation in the anxiety surrounding the durability of crypto's security, a debate that has intensified as both AI and quantum computing advance. In March, after a Google paper suggested quantum computers could break crypto's cryptography sooner than expected, Drake put the odds of Q-Day occurring by 2032 at 10% or more.

The Ethereum Foundation formed a dedicated post-quantum team earlier this year, and co-founder Vitalik Buterin has laid out plans to move the network toward quantum-resistant cryptography. Drake's call now adds a near-term, AI-driven urgency to work that had largely been framed as preparation for a quantum future.

Drake said Ethereum's roadmap toward hash-based cryptography should now be accelerated. "I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration," he wrote. What happens next is easy to track: whether the exchanges he named act on his cold-storage appeal, and whether Ethereum's post-quantum roadmap picks up the pace he is demanding.