Justin Drake urges crypto ‘bunker mode,’ as AI could break wallet security within months

Ethereum researcher Justin Drake has urged the industry to prepare for “bunker mode,” recommending users gradually move assets to fresh addresses amid concerns that advances in artificial intelligence could undermine the cryptography used in today’s blockchains.

In an X post on Wednesday, Drake said recent advances in AI, particularly OpenAI’s release of mathematical breakthroughs, suggest AI could eventually make it possible to break the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) used to secure cryptocurrency wallets.

“It is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years,” said Drake.

The warning raises the prospect that AI could enable attackers to recover private keys from exposed public keys sooner than anticipated, well before sufficiently powerful quantum computers become available.

Mathematical superintelligence

“Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen,” said Drake.

On Tuesday, OpenAI released hundreds of new mathematical findings across a variety of topics such as algebra, theoretical computer science and mathematical logic.

Last month the company said it used 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.