Ethereum Researcher Urges Crypto Industry to Prepare for AI Attack Risk

Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake warned that advances involving artificial intelligence could eventually threaten transaction-signing systems used by Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) and other tokens.

In an Oct. 7 post at about 10:14 a.m. ET (14:14 UTC), Drake called for the industry to calmly plan for “bunker mode.” Drake said an extreme-case scenario could see ECDSA compromised within months rather than years.

Drake described a potential attack as recovering a private key in roughly one week with available hardware such as a large GPU cluster. No practical AI attack recovering a Bitcoin or Ethereum private key has been demonstrated.

He recommended controlled preparation, including gradually moving assets to fresh addresses whose public keys have not been exposed through earlier transactions. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin cautioned users against rushing into new wallets, saying migration mistakes could cause losses.

The warning concerns a possible classical cryptography breakthrough assisted by AI, separate from the quantum-computing threat that Ethereum’s security work primarily addresses. Ethereum’s roadmap targets quantum-resistant infrastructure across its execution, consensus and data layers by December 2029.