OpenAI’s latest advances in mathematics have prompted a leading Ethereum researcher to warn that crypto’s core wallet security could face an unexpected AI threat.

On Oct. 7, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake urged the blockchain industry to prepare for what he described as “bunker mode,” including a controlled migration of digital assets into fresh addresses whose public keys have never been exposed.

Drake said large and sophisticated holders should consider moving most of their assets to addresses that have never signed transactions. Once those addresses are used to send funds, he recommended transferring any remaining balance into another fresh address.

His warning followed OpenAI’s Oct. 6 release of a broad collection of new mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model.

The company said it tested the model across thousands of problems, published many of the resulting proofs with computer-checkable Lean formalizations and spent the equivalent of about three hours of ChatGPT Pro reasoning on the average result.

Drake argued that the accelerating pace of AI-driven mathematical discovery should force the crypto industry to reconsider assumptions about how long elliptic-curve cryptography will remain secure.

“In the worst case,” he said, an effective break of the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm, or ECDSA, could arrive “in months, not years.”

OpenAI’s announcement does not report a practical attack on ECDSA or RSA. Drake’s months timeline is a worst-case conjecture, not a demonstrated capability.

Bitcoin and Ethereum rely heavily on elliptic-curve cryptography to establish ownership and authorize transactions.

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