Ethereum Researcher Warns AI Could Break Bitcoin and Ether Wallet Signatures in Months

Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake has urged the crypto industry to start planning for what he calls “bunker mode,” warning that artificial intelligence could break the elliptic-curve signatures securing Bitcoin and Ether wallets “in months, not years.” In a post on X on October 7, Drake called for a “controlled mass migration” of funds to fresh addresses whose public keys have never appeared onchain. Within hours the warning split the field: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin agreed the risk is real but told holders not to rush.

Why Drake Thinks AI Could Beat Quantum to the Punch

Drake’s worst case is not the quantum attack the industry has spent years preparing for. He wrote that it is now “reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday,” defining a break as fast private-key recovery, “e.g. in one week,” on available hardware such as “a large GPU cluster.” That is a classical-computing scenario, and it would land years earlier than Ethereum’s December 2029 target for moving onto quantum-resistant cryptography.

The trigger is OpenAI’s release of 722 mathematics manuscripts on October 6, produced by an unreleased frontier model across roughly 4,000 problems. Drake said the drop showed “mathematical superintelligence is upon us,” and argued that elliptic curves, with their “rich structure,” are more exposed than hash functions, which are designed to leave little pattern to exploit. The distinction reframes the quantum threat regulators have flagged: AI would not need a quantum computer to hunt for a shortcut.