Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake has issued a warning that artificial intelligence could potentially break cryptocurrency's encryption before quantum computers do, prompting him to call for the industry to begin planning defensive measures.
Drake's concern centers on ECDSA, the signature scheme used by Bitcoin and Ethereum to authorize transactions. When a wallet signs a transaction, its public key becomes visible on the blockchain. If ECDSA were broken, an attacker could work backward from the public key to the private key and access funds in the wallet.
In a post on X, Drake urged the blockchain industry to "calmly begin planning for 'bunker mode'" and recommended a controlled migration of assets to fresh addresses that have never signed a transaction, keeping their public keys hidden behind a hash.
Drake cited rapid advances in AI-driven mathematics, including recent results published by OpenAI, as evidence that long-held cryptographic assumptions may be vulnerable. He noted that in the worst case, ECDSA could break "in months not years," defining "break" as recovering a private key in about a week using available hardware such as a large GPU cluster.
Drake stressed that holders should not panic or rush, noting that moving assets to new addresses requires no new cryptography or wallet infrastructure. He specifically urged major exchanges including Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether to harden their cold storage systems.
Drake also noted that Bitcoin wallets holding less than 50 BTC may have partial protection, as approximately 20,000 exposed addresses tied to Bitcoin's creator each hold 50 BTC and would likely be targeted first.
The Ethereum Foundation established a dedicated post-quantum cryptography team earlier this year, and the network has laid out plans to transition toward quantum-resistant cryptography. Drake said Ethereum's roadmap toward hash-based cryptography should be accelerated, stating he would push for "maximum defensive acceleration."
This warning marks an escalation in concerns about cryptocurrency security threats. In March, following a Google paper suggesting quantum computers could break crypto cryptography sooner than previously expected, Drake assessed the odds of quantum computers achieving this capability by 2032 at 10% or higher.
