Ethereum Researcher Warns A.I. Could Break Blockchain Encryption Before Quantum Computers
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden
Ethereum’s Justin Drake says AI could crack Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures before quantum machines do. He wants crypto to start planning now, not wait for the apocalypse to arrive on schedule.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
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For years, the crypto crowd treated quantum computers as the big bad. Justin Drake, an Ethereum Foundation researcher, thinks AI may beat them to it. On Wednesday, he urged the industry on X to start planning for what he called “bunker mode,” warning that Bitcoin and Ethereum’s signature systems could fail in months, not years, if advances in AI-driven maths keep piling up.
The worry sits with ECDSA, the elliptic-curve scheme used to prove a transaction was signed by the right private key. Once a wallet signs, its public key is exposed on the blockchain. If that signature scheme were broken, an attacker could work back from the public key to the private key and empty the wallet. Drake says “break” would mean recovering a private key in about a week on hardware such as a large GPU cluster.
His alarm is tied to the recent flood of AI-assisted math work. OpenAI has released hundreds of new math results from an unreleased model, and Drake sees that as evidence that old assumptions are getting shaky. He argues elliptic curves are especially exposed to superintelligence because of their rich mathematical structure. Hash functions, in his view, are built to be tougher targets.
Drake’s response is not panic but a managed migration. Funds should move, slowly, to fresh addresses that have never signed a transaction, so the public key stays hidden behind a hash. He singled out Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex and Tether as custodians that should harden cold storage. Smaller Bitcoin holders with less than 50 BTC have what he calls “Satoshi’s shield,” because roughly 20,000 addresses tied to Satoshi Nakamoto already hold 50 BTC each and would likely be the first targets.
On Ethereum, Drake wants the switch to hash-based cryptography to speed up. The foundation already has a post-quantum team, and quantum-safe infrastructure is currently planned for around 2029. Vitalik Buterin agrees the risk deserves attention, but he does not want users scrambling to move funds today. Others are much less impressed. Coinbase cryptography chief Yehuda Lindell says there is “no evidence whatsoever” that elliptic-curve assumptions are close to failing, and Jan3 CEO Samson Mow mocked the warning as panic over “silly things.”
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the right kind of paranoia: boring, procedural, and early. Crypto keeps pretending security upgrades should arrive only after a crisis, which is a lovely way to end up with frozen coins or stolen ones. The real scandal isn’t Drake’s warning; it’s how long the industry waits before treating boring cryptography work like an emergency.
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