Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterinhe publicly supported a warning that is circulating in the crypto community: advances in artificial intelligence in mathematics they could undermine the strength of the cryptography underlying current blockchainsand they could do so before quantum computers reach the maturity necessary for a concrete attack.
Buterin’s intervention came in response to a post published Wednesday on X by researcher Justin Drake, who is also active in the Ethereum ecosystem. Drake has invited the sector to prepare for a sort of “bunker mode”a scenario in which AI could in the future make it possible to violate the ECDSA elliptic curve digital signature algorithm, used to protect cryptocurrency wallets. The proposal is to start a gradual migration of funds towards new directions, in which the public key is not yet exposed.
Buterin, however, wanted to avoid alarmist tones: “I don’t recommend anyone rush into moving their funds to new wallets today” he wrote. “But we should take the risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated mathematics seriously.”
According to Drake, the concern arises from the publication on Tuesday of hundreds of new mathematical results by OpenAI. The results span multiple domains, including algebra, theoretical computer science, and mathematical logic, and show the speed with which AI is advancing in this discipline.
Furthermore, last month the company employed a team of 10,000 autonomous AI agents, operating in parallel, to solve the Navier-Stokes equation, one of the most famous and complex unsolved problems in mathematics and physics, in just 88 hours.
“The last few days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Consolidated and never questioned hypotheses have fallen“Drake said, adding that elliptic curves could be particularly vulnerable to superintelligence.
The motivation is structural in nature: “Curves have a rich structure, which leaves room for sophisticated tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (In contrast, hash functions are designed to minimize algebraic structure),” he explained.
Buterin extended the reflection to lattice-based cryptography, which is considered one of the ways to resist quantum attacks. According to the co-founder of Ethereum, these systems could also be affected by the progress of AI applied to mathematics.
“So far most people think along the lines of ‘violated elliptic curves, safe hashes, safe lattices,’” he wrote. “But there is a good chance that the concrete security of lattices will take serious hits in the next couple of years of AI-driven math.”
Buterin indicated this scenario as one of the reasons why Ethereum’s “lean” roadmap is moving towards a “hash-only” approach, i.e. based exclusively on hash functions.
Along the same lines Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner of Dragonfly, who called Drake’s warning “a very sober call” to caution. “The risk is not quantum, but simply conventional mathematics overturning assumptions of unproven cryptographic difficulty,” he wrote on X.
“My personal recommendation is to start a controlled mass migration of assets to new addresses“, said Drake. In his opinion, large holders and more structured operators should move first. Drake also recommends transferring the remaining funds to a new address after signing a transaction, at which point the public key is effectively exposed.
Buterin supported the precaution, as long as it is simple to implement: “If it’s not difficult for you, keeping funds in addresses that have not yet been used to make a transaction is a good idea.”
The Ethereum co-founder, however, warned about the risks inherent in the migrations themselves: “I have personally lost more money in failed migrations than in all hacks combined.” Along the same lines as Drake, according to whom every migration should be gradual and carefully managed: “A Rushed migration would do more harm than good“.
