Ethereum researcher Justin Drake calls for 'bunker mode' against AI crypto threat

Drake urges industry to hide crypto assets from incoming AI threat

Justin Drake, a senior researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, is calling on the cryptocurrency industry to enter "bunker mode" to protect digital assets from an impending AI-driven cybersecurity threat. In a post on X that drew millions of views, Drake warned that artificial intelligence could break the elliptic curve cryptography used by most blockchains within months.

He argued that the risk from AI-accelerated math may arrive even sooner than the long-feared quantum computing threat. Drake urged the largest crypto entities and their billionaire operators to lead the way by moving assets into new wallets that have never been used to sign a transaction.

Key numbers and names

• Drake co-authored a March paper with Google Quantum AI suggesting breaking elliptic curve cryptography could require as few as 1,200 logical qubits, a 20-fold drop from prior estimates.
• In June, Drake forecasted the chance of quantum computers cracking major cryptography at 10% by 2030 and 50% by 2032.
• He named four major custodians to lead the migration: Binance (Changpeng Zhao), Robinhood (Vlad Tenev), Bitbank (Babak Zanjani), and Bitfinex and Tether (Giancarlo Devasini).
• OpenAI published a batch of AI-generated mathematical results on October 7, 2026, which Drake cited as evidence that mathematical superintelligence may have already arrived.

What Vitalik Buterin said

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared Drake's concern while adding a note of caution. "I don't recommend anyone scramble to move their funds to new wallets today," Buterin wrote on X. "But we should take the risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated math seriously, and minimize our exposure to not just quantum-vulnerable cryptography, but also potentially AI-vulnerable cryptography."

How 'bunker wallets' would work

Drake's proposal centers on a concept long practiced by careful Bitcoin holders: never reusing wallet addresses. When a wallet has never sent a transaction, only a hashed version of its public key appears on the blockchain. A hacker would need to reverse both the hash and the private key to steal funds, adding an extra step compared to targeting wallets that have already revealed their full public key.

Drake acknowledged that Satoshi Nakamoto wrote about this privacy practice back in October 2008 and thanked Satoshi's large, publicly visible wallets for potentially shielding smaller investors from the first wave of attacks.

Under Drake's plan, any withdrawal from a bunker wallet would need to be followed immediately by moving the funds into another fresh, unused wallet — ideally within the same block of transactions.

What remains unclear

Drake admitted that exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography that does not yet exist or have consensus support on blockchains like Bitcoin. It is also unconfirmed whether AI systems will actually be able to break elliptic curve cryptography in the timeframe Drake predicts, or whether the threat will remain theoretical.

Why this matters for crypto users

If AI can indeed crack the math behind current cryptographic systems, it could undermine the security model that protects billions of dollars in digital assets. Drake's warning comes at a time when the industry is already preparing for quantum computing threats, and a faster-moving AI threat could compress timelines for adopting new security standards.

Source

• Protos

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