Morning Minute: Ethereum Researcher Says AI May Break Crypto Encryption Before Quantum

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🔐 Ethereum Researcher Says AI May Break Crypto Encryption Before Quantum

Justin Drake has spent years warning that quantum computers could eventually break the math protecting crypto wallets. On Wednesday, he said something more alarming : AI might get there first, and possibly within months.

Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, called on the industry to start planning for what he called bunker mode. His advice is to move coins to fresh addresses that have never sent a transaction.

Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash.

— Justin Drake (@drakefjustin) October 7, 2026

Here’s why that matters. Every wallet has a private key you keep secret and a public key derived from it. The public key stays hidden behind a scrambled version of itself until you spend from that wallet. The moment you send a transaction, your public key becomes visible on the blockchain forever. If someone figures out how to work backward from a public key to a private key, every wallet that has ever sent money is exposed. Wallets that have only ever received are not.

The system doing that math is called ECDSA, and Bitcoin and Ethereum both rely on it. Drake says it’s now reasonable to prepare for it breaking before quantum computers arrive, in the worst case in months rather than years. By breaking, he means recovering someone’s private key in about a week using a large cluster of graphics cards.

What changed his thinking is how fast AI is solving hard math. He pointed to 722 mathematical results OpenAI published Tuesday. His argument is that elliptic curves, the structure ECDSA is built on, have exactly the kind of rich mathematical patterns a superintelligent system might exploit, while the hashing used to hide public keys is designed to resist that.

He named Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether and asked them to harden their cold storage. He also offered small holders a strange comfort: roughly 20,000 addresses believed to belong to Bitcoin’s creator each hold 50 BTC with exposed public keys. Anyone who cracked this would likely go for those first. He calls it Satoshi’s shield.

So where does this leave us? Drake is careful to say don’t panic and don’t rush, and to begin the process of moving self-custodied crypto into new, safe wallets. But there are alternatives. Use the ETFs. Use a proven custodian like Coinbase. And if you want to hold your own keys, consider working with experts to ensure best practices.

Any action is likely better than just burying one’s head in the sand and hoping this all passes…