Justin Drake calls on the cryptocurrency industry to enter "refuge mode" to deal with AI mathemati

Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, advises crypto users to migrate funds in advance to deal with potential security risks

Justin Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, recommends that participants in the cryptocurrency space start quietly moving funds into new wallets. He pointed out that before quantum computers actually arrive, the signature scheme that secures Bitcoin and Ethereum may be cracked.

Drake's Warning and Protection Strategy

Drake made this proposition in a post and called on the crypto industry to "calmly start preparing for the 'fortress mode'." His core point is that first, large holders should move assets to addresses where the public key is hidden behind the hash value, provided that the address has never signed any transactions.

Drake's reasoning is logical. Bitcoin and Ethereum rely on the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) to verify that transactions come from the true key holder. Once an address signs anything, its public key is basically exposed on the chain. Drake believes any funds left in the signed address should be transferred again.

Drake does not claim that current cryptography has failed. At present, Ethereum officials say that quantum computers cannot break the network and users do not need to worry too much. However, Drake predicts that such a "quantum breakthrough" could occur within months, rather than years.

Why AI breakthroughs are the trigger point, not quantum computers

Most people are expecting "Q-Day", the day when quantum computers break public key cryptography. But Drake made a different argument; he linked the warning to the proliferation of mathematical results generated by artificial intelligence. For example, OpenAI released a copy of 722 mathematical manuscripts generated from in-house models that have not yet been launched.

The results of these manuscripts were organized into 372 families and published in a public GitHub repository. Most of these proofs have been formalized in Lean, making it easy for computer verification. OpenAI said the internal model accepted approximately 4,000 questions.

Drake saw this and thought he saw the future and wrote: "Mathematical superintelligence has arrived."

His concern stems from the fact that elliptic curves have more mathematical structure than hash functions, which he believes makes them more vulnerable to new discoveries. He hinted at a future scenario: new algorithms on ordinary computers could crack both elliptic curve cryptography and RSA without the need for quantum hardware.

Case of AI discovering encryption errors

Drake is not the only person who views AI as an encryption risk rather than just an encryption tool. In July, Anthropic said its Claude Mythos Preview model improved on HAWK's best known attacks and reduced its key strength by 50% within 60 hours.

HAWK is one of the post-quantum signature candidates submitted to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Anthropic said the discovery would not have any impact on production systems because HAWK has not yet been deployed.

The quantum technology trajectory has not slowed down. According to reports, future quantum computers may be able to crack elliptic curve cryptography that protects cryptocurrencies with fewer qubits than previously thought, and reiterated the 2029 migration deadline.

Expose the distribution of funds

A Europol report released this week concluded that the blockchain itself would not be attacked by quantum computing hackers due to the strength of the hash function that binds blocks. The report identified wallets as the "main point of exposure" and that the only solution was preventive migration, which Drake urged.

Europol cited online data showing that as of May 2026, the public keys of 6.04 million BTC (approximately 30.2% of supply) had been exposed.

Drake mentioned Project Eleven's Bitcoin Risq List, which tracks more than 14 million addresses with exposure keys. About 20,000 of these exposed addresses hold fewer than 50 BTC's, and attackers may target these addresses before moving to smaller wallets. Drake calls these wallets the "Shields of Satya."

Drake talked about "post-AI cryptography", which is necessary to exit "fortress mode." He prefers security based on a hash function. Ethereum's draft roadmap has also tilted in this direction, namely hash-based solutions and formal verification.