Bitcoin and Ethereum’s security could collapse within months due to a breakthrough in artificial intelligence

Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake has been warning the industry for years about the threat of quantum computers. Now he believes that artificial intelligence could break cryptographic protections much sooner.

On Wednesday, Drake posted a call on X for the blockchain industry to «calmly begin preparing for bunker mode.» By this, he means a controlled, mass migration of assets to new addresses whose public keys have never been exposed on the network—that is, those that have never signed a transaction.

At the heart of the concern is the ECDSA algorithm, which Bitcoin and Ethereum use to validate transactions. When a wallet signs a transaction, its public key becomes visible on the blockchain. If ECDSA is successfully cracked, an attacker could recover the private key and empty the wallet.

Drake believes that ECDSA could be compromised even before the so-called «Q-Day"—the moment when quantum computers become powerful enough to break modern encryption. In the worst-case scenario, we’re talking about «months, not years.» By «cracking,» he means recovering the private key in about a week using readily available hardware—for example, a large GPU cluster.

A wave of mathematical discoveries involving artificial intelligence—specifically, the 722 results that OpenAI published on Tuesday—sparked these new concerns. «Elliptic curves seem particularly vulnerable to superintelligence,» Drake wrote, explaining that their complex mathematical structure leaves room for non-standard attacks, whereas hash functions are specifically designed to be resistant to such approaches.

Despite the seriousness of the warning, Drake urges asset holders not to panic or rush—transferring funds does not require new cryptographic tools or wallets. Separately, he addressed Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether, calling on them to strengthen their cold storage security. Wallets containing less than 50 BTC are partially protected by the so-called «Satoshi Shield»: approximately 20,000 public addresses linked to Bitcoin’s creator, each containing 50 BTC, will be prime targets for attack.

The Ethereum Foundation established a dedicated post-quantum team earlier this year, and the network’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, has already outlined plans to transition to quantum-resistant cryptography. Drake emphasized that Ethereum’s shift toward hash-based cryptography should be accelerated: «I will push for maximum defensive acceleration,» he wrote.