Crypto braces for "bunker mode" as OpenAI pushes deeper into mathematics

OpenAI dropped more than 700 math papers, and now an Ethereum researcher wants crypto holders to prepare for "bunker mode."

Justin Drake, an Ethereum Foundation researcher, is urging crypto holders to prepare for what he calls "bunker mode" after a new OpenAI math release reignited fears that AI could eventually find shortcuts through the mathematics protecting digital wallets.

Drake's warning, posted on Oct. 7 in an X post, is about what could happen if AI systems become good enough at mathematics to uncover weaknesses that human cryptographers have missed for decades.

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. Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase). Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets. IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By "break" I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster). 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. In hindsight, May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot. Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time? Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.) Separately, 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. Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case. I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11's "risq list" (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I'll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026). Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from "Satoshi's shield", i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. 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. 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. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security. 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.

— Justin Drake (@drakefjustin) October 7, 2026

The basic risk reaches deeper than malware or a stolen recovery phrase.

• A wallet's private key authorizes spending.
• Its public key lets a blockchain verify those signatures without revealing the secret.
• That system works because deriving the private key from the public one is assumed to be computationally impractical.

But if an AI-assisted mathematical breakthrough changed that assumption, an attacker could potentially recreate a signing key and approve withdrawals without ever touching the victim's device.

OpenAI gave cryptographers a new headache

Drake posted his warning a day after OpenAI released more than 700 mathematical manuscripts grouped into 372 families of results. Some of the results include computer-checkable proofs.

• OpenAI also cautioned that manuscripts without formal verification could still contain errors.

Drake called the release evidence that "mathematical superintelligence is upon us" and argued that the same kind of progress could eventually expose mathematical shortcuts in elliptic-curve cryptography.

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's co-founder, followed with his own Oct. 7 post on X, saying AI could also weaken lattice-based cryptography, a family of techniques used in some systems being developed to withstand quantum computers, and adding that its practical security could take "serious hits" over the next two years.

I don't recommend anyone scramble to move their funds to new wallets today. But we should take the risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated math seriously, and minimize our exposure to not just quantum-vulnerable cryptography, but also potentially AI-vulnerable cryptography. The core new area of risk from this viewpoint is, unfortunately, ML-DSA / FHE / lattices. (and it's also another reason, along with quantum, why ECDSA might fall even faster than expected, hence the "fresh address" recommendation) So far most people have been in the mode of thinking "elliptic curves broken, hashes safe, lattices safe". But there is a good chance that the concrete security of lattices will take serious hits from the next two years of AI math. The basic threat model is: factoring is something that naively takes 2^(n/2) time, but over decades smart people have found and optimized number field sieves, and degraded that to 2^O(n^(1/3)), which is why RSA keys and signatures need to be ~400 bytes (and not 64 bytes). What if there are skeletons in the closet like that, both for elliptic curves and lattices, that we are simply not smart enough to discover - but bots soon will be? This is a major part of the reason why for the past year ethereum's lean roadmap has been going in the "hash-only" direction: no lattices, no ML-DSA, no Falcon, no lattice-based commitments inside ZK proofs, etc. Signatures in lean ethereum are all hash-based, either WOTS or SPHINCS-. For signatures and proofs, we already know how to go hash-only. The bigger challenge is for *public-key encryption* - and this goes far beyond blockchains. Secure communication, anonymizing protocols, lots of things need public-key encryption. And unfortunately there are long-standing mathematical theorems showing why public-key encryption cannot be done with hashes alone. You have to have some kind of trapdoor object that has at least one form of usable "structure" - either group theory (incl. isogenies) or lattices or code-based or potentially in the future even more newfangled and spooky things (local mixing?). But for anything that has structure, you should assume that AI will make at least some progress in breaking that structure. Here, one reasonable inference is that if you want to make something plausibly long-term secure, multiply the key sizes by 10. To me that's a very plausible world and something not at all extreme to predict. If AI will bring us 50 years of math in 2 years, then that 50 years of math may very plausibly include a "naive factoring -> GNFS" level of improvement to our ability to break lattices. In that world, lattices will still exist, but they will have to be significantly bigger to guarantee the same level of safety. And at those new larger sizes, hash-based constructions will beat lattice-based constructions on concrete efficiency in every use case where hash-based constructions are possible at all. Theoretically, of course it's possible that hashes are broken too (eg. P = NP would imply that). But I think P = NP is very unlikely. And intuitively, it's much more likely that a mathematical object has exactly no exploitable structure (like hashes are intended to), than that a mathematical object has exactly ~3 forms of exploitable structure (for elliptic curves: associativity, Schoof, pairings) and not some secret fourth form of structure we have not yet discovered that greatly degrades its security (for elliptic curves, ECDLP and pairing security). Similar for LWE, SVP, RLWE and the zoo of lattice problems. For this reason, we do not yet see any reason to worry and start padding the byte size of hashes (if we start to worry more, we would pad the round count first before doing anything to the byte size). Concrete TLDR, my own personal views: * Hash-based > lattice-based, in those situations where hash-based is possible at all * For anything lattice-based, be much more paranoid on param sizes. Remember that blockchains are only a small portion of the cryptography story; this point goes far beyond blockchains and applies to eg. access to websites, secure messaging, Tor / VPNs ... * For privacy protocols, strongly favor NOT putting encrypted notes onchain. Instead, send them offchain through some third-party mechanism. * If it's not difficult for you, keeping your funds in addresses which have not yet been used to make a transaction is a good idea. If it's easy for you, do it. **But be careful about migrations; I personally have lost more money in botched migrations than I have lost in all hacks combined**. * For multisig wallets, doing confirmations offchain is better than onchain, because this way the signatures of signer wallets do not get exposed to the public, so if ECDSA falls to AI much faster than expected, at least the multisig "gracefully degrades" to a 1-of-1 where the 1 is whoever was gathering the signatures - a much better place to be than "anyone can take the money" https://t.co/oVjwZog2lL

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 7, 2026

His concern is broader than crypto as public-key cryptography also sits underneath secure messaging, websites, VPNs and other digital systems.

Scott Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, raised a separate point in his Oct. 7 blog post called "The Mathocalypse."

Aaronson wrote that, according to his sources, AI companies have started "gingerly and discreetly" testing whether their latest internal models can break important cryptographic protocols and primitives.

He didn't identify the companies or describe any successful break.

Arthur Breitman, the Tezos co-founder, then speculated on X that the lack of major cryptography results in OpenAI's release could itself mean some work was being withheld.

Breitman provided no evidence that OpenAI or another lab has found a way to break wallet cryptography.

No evidence ECDSA has been broken

Drake described "months not years" as a worst-case timeline rather than a forecast.

His example assumes that a new mathematical method could let a large cluster of conventional computers recover a private key in roughly a week. But that calculation is hypothetical and Drake didn't point to any existing algorithm capable of doing it.

Yehuda Lindell, Coinbase's head of cryptography, also disputed the inference in an X thread, saying there is "no evidence whatsoever" that such a break is close.

Lindell argued that AI solving difficult mathematical problems doesn't establish that the particular problems used in modern cryptography have efficient solutions waiting to be discovered.

I wasn't going to comment since this is a really bad take IMO, but since it's taken off I feel the need to. To my understanding, there is no evidence whatsoever pointing to a break of decades old hardness assumptions like elliptic curve cryptography. 1/n

— Yehuda Lindell (@LindellYehuda) October 8, 2026

Different chains, different problems

Bitcoin and ordinary Ethereum wallets use elliptic-curve signatures, including ECDSA, to prove that a transaction was approved by the holder of the correct private key.

Bitcoin's newer Schnorr signatures, introduced in 2021 via the Taproot soft fork upgrade, also rely on elliptic curves. So if a mathematical breakthrough substantially weakened the underlying curve problem, both systems could be affected.

Drake's proposed precaution is to keep most funds in fresh addresses whose public keys haven't yet been exposed.

That can work on Ethereum because a normal Ethereum address is derived from a hash of the public key. The public key generally becomes recoverable once that wallet signs a transaction.

Some Bitcoin address types offer similar protection before spending. Taproot addresses are different because they already expose a public key.

Jacob Creech, vice president of technology at the Solana Foundation, said on X that Solana instead has a "defined path forward."

• Creech pointed to a possible recovery mechanism in which the original seed used to derive a compromised signing key could remain secret.
• A future network change could then allow the owner to prove knowledge of that seed and replace the exposed key.

The Anza prototype he linked to, however, describes its current approach as a "temporary engineering compromise" and says the complete version isn't yet practical.

Fresh addresses may buy time, not certainty

Even on Bitcoin and Ethereum, moving to an unused address isn't a permanent shield since spending from that address can expose its public key again. The protection also assumes that the hash function used to conceal the public key remains secure.

Lindell has challenged the assumption that hashes should automatically be treated as safer against unknown AI-driven attacks, pointing to hash functions that were once considered secure and later weakened.

Dankrad Feist, a researcher at payments blockchain Tempo and a former Ethereum Foundation researcher, raised another issue in an X response.

If a cryptographic break allowed attackers to drain exposed wallets across an entire blockchain, Feist argued that coins kept safely in an unexposed wallet might still lose their market value.

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