Ethereum Researcher Says AI May Break Encryption Before Quantum Does

Justin Drake has spent years warning that quantum computers could one day crack crypto's cryptography. Now the Ethereum Foundation researcher says artificial intelligence might get there first.

"Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for 'bunker mode,'" Drake wrote on X on Wednesday. His recommendation is a controlled, mass migration of funds to fresh addresses that have never signed a transaction, which keep their public keys hidden behind a hash.

The concern centers on ECDSA, the signature scheme Bitcoin and Ethereum use to prove a transaction was authorized by the right private key. When a wallet signs a transaction, its public key becomes visible on-chain. If ECDSA were broken, an attacker could work backward from that public key to the private key and drain the wallet.

Drake said it's now reasonable to prepare for ECDSA breaking before Q-Day, the moment quantum computers become powerful enough to crack today's encryption, "in the worst case in months not years." By "break," he meant recovering a private key in about a week on available hardware such as a large GPU cluster.

He pointed to a burst of AI-driven math, including 722 results OpenAI published Tuesday, as a sign that long-held assumptions are falling. "Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence," he wrote. He argued that their rich mathematical structure leaves room for clever attacks that hash functions are designed to resist.

Drake stressed that holders shouldn't rush or panic, noting that moving assets requires no new cryptography or wallets. He urged Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether to harden their cold storage. He also said wallets holding less than 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from what he called "Satoshi's shield": roughly 20,000 exposed addresses tied to Bitcoin's creator, each holding 50 BTC, which would likely be targeted first.

The warning marks a sharp escalation in the anxiety around the ability of crypto’s security to be broken. In March, after a Google paper suggested quantum computers could break crypto's cryptography sooner than expected, Drake put the odds of Q-Day by 2032 at 10% or more.

The Ethereum Foundation formed a dedicated post-quantum team earlier this year, and co-founder Vitalik Buterin has laid out plans to move the network toward quantum-resistant cryptography.

Drake said Ethereum's roadmap toward hash-based cryptography should now be accelerated. "I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration," he wrote.