Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake warned the blockchain industry on Wednesday to begin preparing for what he called “bunker mode,” arguing that AI-driven mathematical breakthroughs could crack a digital signature scheme used by Bitcoin before quantum computers do. Bitcoin has historically relied on ECDSA signatures, while newer Taproot outputs use Schnorr signatures. Drake’s warning specifically concerns the possibility of an imminent break in ECDSA.

“IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years,” Drake wrote. “By ‘break’ I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster).”

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.

Drake is a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, where he has worked on Ethereum scaling, consensus, and more recently post-quantum security.

Tuesday’s OpenAI math dump was the backdrop for Drake’s post. The company published a GitHub pile of new results related to mathematics from an internal model. Drake treated the thin showing on cryptography in OpenAI’s latest release and other similar releases as a tell. “I’ve witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results,” he wrote. “Backroom interventionism is my base case.”

g. Binance, Robinhood, Tether) should move funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction, so the public key stays hidden behind a hash, and should send the remainder to a fresh address whenever they do sign.

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