Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake called on the blockchain industry on Oct. 7 to start planning, calmly, for what he described as “bunker mode” — a controlled shift of holdings to fresh addresses whose public keys remain hidden behind a hash.
Drake tied that warning to OpenAI’s release of 722 mathematical results the previous day. In his view, it is reasonable to prepare for a worst-case scenario in which ECDSA breaks before qday, possibly in months rather than years. He did not say that any break has already occurred.
ECDSA is the signature scheme used by most Bitcoin and Ethereum accounts. Drake told readers, “Don’t rush,” while suggesting that large holders consider moving most of their funds to addresses that have not yet signed a transaction.
Critics say the warning goes too far
Yehuda Lindell, who leads cryptography at Coinbase, called Drake’s post “a really bad take.” He said there is “no evidence whatsoever” that decades-old hardness assumptions behind elliptic curve cryptography are on the verge of failing.
Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet took a similar line. He wrote that treating a classical attack on ECDSA within months as the working scenario still looks like FUD. Guillemet said avoiding address reuse can make sense for large holders, but a broad migration could introduce operational mistakes that lose funds with higher probability than the threat being addressed.
Dankrad Feist argued that if exposed public keys become exploitable and white-hat hackers do not secure everyone’s assets first, “your coins are going to zero, and bunker mode is not going to help you.”
Helius’s Mert Mumtaz also rejected the advice. In a post, he wrote, “absolutely do not take justin’s advice btw,” and in the same message described Drake’s warning as “an unnecessarily performative post.”
Not everyone disagreed. Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi backed the warning and called it “a very sober call.” He said the underlying risk is that conventional mathematics could overturn unproven cryptographic hardness assumptions.
Buterin urges caution, not panic
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said in a post that he does not recommend anyone scramble to move funds to new wallets today. At the same time, he said risks tied to AI-accelerated mathematical progress should be taken seriously.
Buterin added that ECDSA could fail faster than expected. If moving funds is easy, he said, keeping them in addresses that have not yet made a transaction is a good idea.
He also warned about the cost of getting the move wrong: “I personally have lost more money in botched migrations than I have lost in all hacks combined.”
Buterin named lattice-based schemes such as ML-DSA as a core new area of risk.
The debate reaches Solana and Ethereum’s roadmap
Jacob Creech argued that Solana users do not need bunker mode because Solana keys are derived from a hashed seed that is never exposed onchain.
Drake, for his part, said the timelines in Ethereum’s roadmap now need to be revisited and accelerated in light of what he called “mathematical superintelligence.”