Justin Drake warns AI could break crypto wallet keys within months at worst. Buterin's reply: don't rush

An Ethereum researcher has told crypto holders to prepare for the possibility that artificial intelligence breaks their wallets' security sooner than expected. Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation wrote on X on Wednesday, October 7, that the industry should calmly begin planning for what he called bunker mode, The Block and Decrypt reported.

His worry is ECDSA, the signature scheme Bitcoin and Ethereum use to confirm that a transaction was approved by the holder of a private key. Drake said new mathematics found with AI could break it before quantum computers can, in the worst case within months rather than years. He pointed to OpenAI's publication on Tuesday of 722 mathematical results produced by an internal model. He called it a personal recommendation and did not claim that anything has been broken.

His advice is to move funds, without panic, to fresh addresses whose public keys stay hidden, starting with large holders. He urged Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex and Tether to harden their cold storage.

The reaction split, The Block reported. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the threat from AI-accelerated maths should be taken seriously but warned against haste. "It's very easy to lose funds from a misconfigured rushed upgrade, so don't rush anything," he wrote. Yehuda Lindell, head of cryptography at Coinbase, said there is no evidence that the assumptions behind elliptic-curve cryptography have weakened. Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly, backed taking precautions.

Ethereum's current guidance says quantum computers cannot break the network's cryptography today and that users do not need to act, The Block noted.