Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin warned that artificial intelligence-driven advances in mathematics could weaken the cryptographic signatures protecting both Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as some systems designed to defend against quantum computing threats.
On October 7, Buterin advised cryptocurrency holders to reduce exposure where practical but cautioned against hastily moving funds to new wallets, arguing that migration mistakes pose a more immediate risk than any demonstrated cryptographic breach. "I don't recommend anyone scramble to move their funds to new wallets today," he wrote on X. "But we should take the risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated math seriously."
OpenAI research sparks concern
Buterin's comments followed Ethereum researcher Justin Drake's call for the industry to prepare for potential threats, including moving assets toward fresh addresses whose public keys have never been exposed on the blockchain. Drake raised the possibility that AI could accelerate mathematical attacks on the elliptic-curve cryptography used by Bitcoin and Ethereum.
The debate intensified after OpenAI published new mathematical results on October 6 generated by an internal frontier model, including machine-generated proofs. OpenAI did not report any actual attack on blockchain cryptography, and neither Buterin nor Drake presented evidence that ECDSA—the cryptographic standard used by major blockchains—has been practically broken.
Broader concerns about lattice-based systems
Buterin extended his warning beyond immediate concerns to lattice-based cryptography, including ML-DSA, which he identified as vulnerable to AI-driven mathematical discovery over the next two years. This creates complications for the cryptocurrency industry, which is already preparing defenses against quantum computers. Lattice-based systems represent leading technologies designed to replace cryptography vulnerable to sufficiently powerful quantum machines. NIST standardized ML-DSA in 2024 as a post-quantum digital-signature algorithm.
Buterin argued that the underlying mathematical structures supporting such systems may contain weaknesses researchers have not yet discovered. He compared the risk to the history of integer factorization, where improvements like the general number field sieve dramatically reduced the computational work required to attack RSA encryption, forcing cryptographic systems to use much larger keys.
AI could compress decades of mathematical progress into a shorter period, potentially uncovering comparable advances against elliptic curves or lattice problems. "If AI will bring us 50 years of math in 2 years," Buterin wrote, those advances could include breakthroughs that substantially improve attacks on lattice cryptography.
Ethereum shifts toward hash-based security
Buterin noted that Ethereum developers have increasingly favored cryptographic designs based on hash functions. Ethereum's roadmap has moved toward hash-only systems over the past year, avoiding lattice-based signatures such as ML-DSA and Falcon and reducing reliance on lattice-based commitments within zero-knowledge proofs.
Hash-based signature systems, including WOTS and SPHINCS, depend less on mathematical structures that could yield unexpected shortcuts to attackers. Buterin argued that structured mathematical objects create more room for AI-assisted discovery, while hashes expose far less exploitable structure.
This distinction does not solve every problem. Public-key encryption, used in secure messaging and other applications, cannot generally be built from hashes alone. Those applications require mathematical structures that create a trapdoor for authorized decryption. Buterin suggested that systems relying on those structures may eventually need substantially larger security parameters—potentially multiplying key sizes by as much as ten.
Practical precautions without panic
For cryptocurrency holders, immediate precautions are narrower in scope. Buterin said users who maintain funds in addresses that have never signed a transaction may gain additional protection because their public keys remain hidden behind address hashes. Once an account sends a transaction, its public key becomes visible.
Multisig operators could also reduce exposure by gathering signatures offline and rotating signer keys after operations, limiting how long an exposed key remains useful if ECDSA security deteriorates.
Buterin nonetheless warned against treating those precautions as an emergency migration order, stating he has personally lost more money through failed migrations than through hacks. That leaves wallet providers, custodians and protocol developers with a complicated task: preparing for faster-moving cryptographic risk while avoiding upgrades that introduce operational failures of their own.
