📒 Can AI crack crypto wallets? ⚫️ Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake recently warned on X ab

📒 Can AI crack crypto wallets?

⚫️ Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake recently warned on X about an unexpected potential threat to crypto. He argues that rapid progress in AI-assisted mathematics could eventually lead to a break of ECDSA — the digital signature scheme used by Bitcoin and Ethereum. In a worst-case scenario, he says this could happen within months, even without quantum computers. For now, though, the threat remains purely hypothetical.

⚫️ Drake suggests the industry should start preparing for what he calls “bunker mode.” The idea is to keep large balances on fresh addresses that have never signed a transaction. Their public keys remain unexposed, so even if the underlying signature scheme were compromised, an attacker wouldn’t have a public key to work from.

⚫️ Vitalik Buterin also responded to the warning. He agreed that the risk should be taken seriously, but cautioned against rushing to move funds. According to Vitalik, he has lost more money to botched wallet migrations than to all hacks combined. Ethereum, meanwhile, is already working toward more resilient cryptography.

⚫️ The broader concern is relevant to TON as well. TON uses a different signature scheme — Ed25519 — but it also relies on elliptic-curve cryptography.

⚫️ A TON wallet’s public key becomes visible onchain once the wallet contract is deployed, which normally happens when it sends its first outgoing transaction. Until then, the address can receive GRAM while keeping the public key unexposed. So if this threat ever becomes real, moving funds to a fresh wallet could serve as a temporary defensive measure.

@thedailyton