Ethereum Researcher Warns AI Could Beat Quantum Computers to Crypto’s Cryptography

Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake urged the industry on 7 October to plan for what he termed bunker mode, warning AI-driven maths could break Bitcoin and Ethereum’s signature scheme before quantum computers do.

Posting on X, he recommended a controlled mass migration of funds to fresh addresses. Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should move the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction, he said. Such an address keeps its public key hidden behind a hash. 

That step needs no new cryptography or wallets, Drake said, and a rushed migration would do more harm than good.

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Months, Not Years

Drake wrote that it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA, as that signature scheme is known, breaks in the worst case within months. By a break, he means fast private key recovery, in about a week, on hardware such as a large GPU cluster.

He cited OpenAI’s release of new mathematical results the day before. That OpenAI repository, created on 6 October, holds 722 manuscripts in 372 families produced by an unreleased internal model. OpenAI says many of the results have been formalised in Lean and that some unformalised ones could have issues.

“My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies,” Drake wrote. He named Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex and Tether as having an opportunity to harden their cold storage. 

He added that wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from what he calls Satoshi’s shield, the roughly 20,000 exposed addresses of Bitcoin’s creator that each hold 50 BTC.

Buterin Urges No Scramble

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin replied later that day that he does not recommend anyone scramble to move funds to new wallets immediately. He said the risk from AI-accelerated maths deserves serious attention. The new danger, in his view, lies in lattice-based schemes such as ML-DSA, which could take serious hits from two more years of AI maths.

For that reason, Buterin said, Ethereum’s lean roadmap has gone hash-only for the past year. He agreed that funds belong in never-used addresses for anyone who finds the move easy.

After Google published a more efficient version of Shor’s algorithm in March, Drake put at least a 10% chance on a quantum computer recovering an ECDSA key by 2032. Ethereum’s strawmap already targets a post-quantum base layer built on hash-based schemes. 

The Foundation’s post-quantum team says those layer-one upgrades could be completed by 2029, and Drake said the timelines must now be revisited and accelerated.

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