Morning Minute: Ethereum Researcher Says AI May Break Crypto Encryption Before Quantum

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by >Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. And check out our >daily news show 'FOMO HOUR' covering all of the top stories and market action. 🔐 Ethereum Researcher Says AI May Break Crypto Encryption Before Quantum Justin Drake has spent years warning that quantum computers could eventually break the math protecting crypto wallets. On Wednesday, he said something more alarming: AI might get there first, and possibly within months. Drake, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, called on the industry to start planning for what he called bunker mode. His advice is to move coins to fresh addresses that have never sent a transaction. Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash. — Justin Drake (@drakefjustin) October 7, 2026 Here’s why that matters. Every wallet has a >private key you keep secret and a public key derived from it. The public key stays hidden behind a scrambled version of itself until you spend from that wallet. The moment you send a transaction, your public key becomes visible on the >blockchain forever. If someone figures out how to work backward from a public key to a private key, every wallet that has ever sent money is exposed. Wallets that have only ever received are not. The system doing that math is called ECDSA, and >Bitcoin and >Ethereum both rely on it. Drake says it’s now reasonable to prepare for it breaking before quantum computers arrive, in the worst case in months rather than years. By breaking, he means recovering someone’s private key in about a week