Justin Drake urges crypto ‘bunker mode’ to defend against AI

Ethereum Foundation senior researcher Justin Drake, who for months has raised alarms about a supposedly imminent quantum computing threat, has escalated his forecast: AI, he says, will "break" elliptic curve cryptography within "months."

Saying the threat could arrive even faster than quantum machines, Drake is urging a mass migration of most crypto holdings into new wallets designed for deep cold storage.

He is asking the entire sector, starting with the biggest firms, to conceal their funds from what he considers an almost certain AI breakthrough. He has urged everyone to set up and hold most digital assets in new "bunker" wallets that have never signed a transaction.

In Drake's opinion, these more confidential wallets, which expose less data on public ledgers, will help digital asset owners stay safe during the initial wave of attacks.

Essentially, the post outlines a well-known best practice among Bitcoin holders: never reuse addresses.

Satoshi Nakamoto himself wrote in October 2008: “A new key pair should be used for each transaction to keep them from being linked to a common owner.”

Presenting this concept as if it were new, Drake expressed thanks for Satoshi's large, highly visible wallets, which he says will supposedly shield smaller investors from the first wave of attacks.

But make no mistake, Drake thinks the AI threat is rapidly approaching for everyone.

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.…

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

Bunker mode activated: crypto advised to hide from AI

In a viral X post from yesterday that garnered millions of views, Drake called on the industry to initiate "bunker mode," a mass transfer to new addresses.

He urges the largest organizations and their billionaire leaders to move their assets into bunkers first.

Drake specifically listed four major custodians: Changpeng Zhao's Binance, Vlad Tenev's Robinhood, Babak Zanjani's Bitbank, and Giancarlo Devasini's Bitfinex and Tether.

These four firms, each with a billionaire at the helm, will guide the industry toward safety.

A wallet that has never made a transaction — like a "bunker" Bitcoin wallet, in Drake's view — only reveals a hash of its public key on the blockchain. That privacy stands in contrast to a wallet that has transacted and disclosed its raw public key in its transaction signatures.

Because only the hash of a "bunker" wallet is on the public ledger, a quantum attacker able to break Bitcoin's Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm would need to crack the public key hash first, and then the associated private key, to steal any BTC.

Drake predicts that this additional step — forcing an AI or quantum hacker to reverse the public key hash before the private key — could shield savers in bunker wallets from the initial wave of attacks.

A rational AI or quantum attacker would likely begin with the simplest targets — wallets with exposed public keys, like those of Satoshi.

The crypto bunker lifestyle

In Drake's vision of bunker life, wallets that never transact act like deep cold storage, only moving funds in an emergency.

Any transaction must be followed immediately by a complete sweep of assets into another fresh, never-transacted wallet — ideally within the same block.

He states plainly: “Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography” that is not yet agreed upon for blockchains such as Bitcoin.

In March, Drake co-authored a widely covered paper from Google Quantum AI that indicated breaking the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) could happen with 1,200 logical qubits — a 20-fold decrease from previous estimates of the physical hardware needed for that quantum breakthrough.

In June, Drake predicted Q-day — the date quantum computers break major modern cryptography — at "10% by 2030" and "50% by 2032."

Drake's new concern is non-quantum AI systems. On Tuesday, OpenAI released a batch of AI-generated mathematical findings.

He sees this release as evidence that mathematical superintelligence is here. He cautioned: “In my opinion it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before Qday, in the worst case in months not years.”