Vitalik Flags AI Risk to Crypto, Warns Against Rushed Wallet Moves

What it is

Vitalik Buterin's response to Justin Drake's "bunker mode" proposal, an Ethereum Foundation call to preemptively migrate funds ahead of AI-accelerated cryptanalysis breaking ECDSA.

Preconditions / Affected

Applies to any address that has broadcast a transaction (exposing its public key) and to multisig setups where signer keys are reused across operations. Addresses that have never sent a transaction, and thus never revealed their public key, are not exposed under this threat model.

What to do

• If feasible, hold funds in addresses that have never sent a transaction (public key never exposed).
• For multisigs: rotate each signer to a new key after every operation, collecting signatures offchain rather than reusing the same signer keys repeatedly.
• Do not rush a migration to new wallets/addresses in response to this threat — Buterin explicitly advises against scrambling to move funds "today."

Caveats

Buterin states migrations themselves carry real risk — he says he has personally "lost more money in botched migrations" than in all hacks combined, so the page frames the migration process itself as a bigger near-term danger than the ECDSA threat it's meant to address. He also flags that ML-DSA, the lattice-based scheme often marketed as quantum-safe, could still take "serious hits" from AI-driven math within two years — so switching to ML-DSA is not presented as a settled long-term fix, only as context for why "lean Ethereum" is leaning toward a hash-only direction instead.