AI Could Break Bitcoin Signatures Before Quantum Computers Do
Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, has urged the blockchain industry to prepare for 'bunker mode.' On October 7 (local time), he warned on X that the ECDSA signature scheme used by Bitcoin and Ethereum—a digital signature technology that proves the authenticity of transactions—could be broken first by mathematical shortcuts discovered through AI rather than by quantum computers. Bunker mode refers to moving assets in a controlled, large-scale manner to new addresses where the public key is hidden behind a hash (a fixed-length cryptographic string). Drake recommended that large holders move most of their funds to addresses with no signing history, and that when signing transactions, they transfer remaining funds to new addresses generated from the same seed phrase (the list of words that serves as the key for wallet recovery).
Drake argued, "It is reasonable to prepare for the possibility that ECDSA will be broken before Q-Day—the point when quantum computers emerge as a threat—and in the worst case, within months rather than years." Here, 'broken' means recovering private keys with hardware such as large GPU clusters in roughly a week. However, he did not claim that anyone has already cracked ECDSA, saying, "A premature migration would do more harm than good."
The direct catalyst was AI's mathematical achievements. Drake said that "the past few days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition," noting that the n log limit for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture had collapsed. OpenAI's release of 722 mathematical results on October 6 also played a role. Those results were produced by an internal state-of-the-art model, formalized in Lean as machine-generated proofs, and OpenAI is known to have reported no attacks on blockchain cryptography. Drake assessed that "OpenAI's announcement made clear that mathematical superintelligence has arrived."
He also explained why elliptic curves are seen as particularly vulnerable. A wallet's public key remains hidden behind a hash until money is sent from that wallet, at which point it is permanently exposed on the blockchain. If a method emerges for deriving a private key from a public key, every wallet that has ever sent money becomes vulnerable. Drake noted that elliptic curves possess rich structure that leaves room for sophisticated techniques such as Schof, Frobenius, and pairings, whereas hashes are designed to minimize algebraic structure. This is why address schemes that hide private keys behind hashes are proposed as a defense.
Drake named Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether as institutions capable of hardening their cold storage, calling on major players to lead by example. He emphasized that this measure is a simple precaution requiring no new cryptographic technology or new wallets.
