Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake called on the blockchain industry to begin preparing for what he called "bunker mode" on October 7, recommending that holders start moving funds to fresh wallet addresses whose public keys remain hidden behind a hash.
"Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for 'bunker mode'," Drake wrote on X. "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 was explicit that this is a precaution, not a response to confirmed exploitation.
"Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either," he wrote.
The specific scenario Drake says is now plausible
Drake's warning centers on a narrower claim than a general quantum computing threat.
"IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years," he wrote. "By 'break' I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster)."
That distinction matters. ECDSA, the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm securing Bitcoin and Ethereum transactions, is considered safe against classical computers today specifically because no known classical algorithm can efficiently reverse the mathematical problem underlying it. Drake's concern is not quantum hardware, which remains years from practical threat, but the possibility that advanced AI systems discover a classical mathematical shortcut that achieves a similar result on conventional GPUs.
Why Drake points to recent math breakthroughs as a warning sign
Drake cited several recent mathematical results as evidence that long-held assumptions can collapse faster than expected.
"Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture," he wrote, adding that "May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot."
The n log(n) bound for integer multiplication refers to a decades-old conjecture about the theoretical minimum time complexity required to multiply large numbers, a foundational question in computational complexity theory. The 3SUM conjecture concerns a similarly foundational problem about whether certain computational problems can be solved faster than a specific threshold. Both had stood as widely accepted assumptions for extended periods before recent results challenged them. Drake's argument is that if assumptions this foundational can fall, cryptographic assumptions built on similarly aged mathematical conjectures deserve renewed scrutiny rather than continued blind trust.
He connected this directly to OpenAI's recent publication of mathematical results.
"Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us," Drake wrote. "Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time?"
Why elliptic curves specifically concern Drake more than hash functions
Drake drew a structural distinction between the two major cryptographic approaches used in blockchain systems.
"Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings," he wrote. "By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure."
This distinction is the same one underlying Ethereum's broader post-quantum roadmap, which StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy demonstrated in practice in August when he constructed a quantum-resistant Bitcoin transaction using signature grinding, a technique relying on hash functions rather than elliptic curve assumptions. Elliptic curve cryptography depends on mathematical structure, specifically the difficulty of the discrete logarithm problem on a curve, that gives sophisticated attackers more surface area to search for shortcuts. Hash functions are deliberately engineered to behave as close to random as possible, offering no comparable mathematical structure for an attacker, human or AI, to exploit.
Drake also raised a separate possibility connecting quantum and classical cryptanalysis.
"As Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once."
What Drake wants large holders and infrastructure operators to do now
Drake pointed specifically to Project Eleven's "risq list," a tracker of exposed Bitcoin public keys, and named major exchanges directly.
"Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage," he wrote.
For smaller holders, Drake noted an unusual mitigating factor.
"Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from 'Satoshi's shield', i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each."
The reasoning here is that Bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, holds an estimated 1 million BTC across early addresses that have never moved funds and whose public keys remain exposed from the earliest blocks. If an attacker gained the capability to break ECDSA, those dormant, high-value Satoshi-era addresses would represent a far more attractive target than smaller modern wallets, theoretically absorbing early attacker attention before smaller holdings became a priority.
Drake also recommended that infrastructure operators take more active steps.
"Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS."
What comes after bunker mode, according to Drake
Drake was clear that moving to hidden-pubkey addresses is a temporary defensive measure, not a permanent fix.
"Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies," he wrote.
He tied his recommendation directly to Ethereum's existing technical roadmap.
"The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration."
Vitalik Buterin's response and the market's reaction
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared Drake's post, signaling agreement that the mathematical risk deserves serious consideration alongside careful, non-panicked migration. Bitcoin dipped more than 2% to trade near $83K amid the discussion, though no direct causal link between Drake's warning and the price move has been established.
Drake said he will address institutional audiences directly on the topic next month during a live Q&A in London, hosted through the Ethereum Institutional forum.
Anastasiia G
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