Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin responded to researcher Justin Drake's "bunker mode" proposal, stating that advancements in artificial intelligence mathematics over the next two years have a high probability of severely weakening the specific security strength of lattice cryptography. He explicitly does not recommend holders rush to move their funds to new wallets today.

The new risk centers around quantum-resistant signature scheme ML-DSA, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), and more broadly, lattice constructions. The industry's previous default judgment was that elliptic curves would fail, hash security would hold, and lattice would also be secure; he amended the latter, believing that lattice can no longer be automatically considered a secure area. This same logic provides an additional reason for ECDSA to fail faster than expected, as Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets generally rely on ECDSA to authorize transactions, and once public keys are exposed on-chain, the risk increases.

He used factorization as an analogy: the naive algorithm's complexity is about 2^(n/2), while the number field sieve reduces the actual complexity to 2^(O(n^(1/3))), causing RSA keys and signatures to expand to about 400 bytes instead of 64 bytes. If AI brings about the equivalent of 50 years of mathematical progress within two years, it is conceivable that similar algorithmic leaps could occur in lattice-based cryptography. His operational inference is that to keep the public key system credible in the long term, key parameters should be increased by about tenfold, and more conservative parameters should be adopted for all lattice-based schemes.

He explicitly expanded the applicability beyond on-chain. Website integration, encrypted communication, Tor, and VPN are not just blockchain issues. Privacy protocols should avoid putting encrypted notes directly on-chain, instead using third-party channels for off-chain transmission; multi-signatures should prioritize off-chain signature confirmations. When funds can be easily managed, they should be placed in addresses that have never initiated transactions to hide the public key, but the migration itself incurs operational losses; he stated that his losses from migration errors have already exceeded those from previous hacking incidents.

The Ethereum Lean route has shifted to pure hash constructions over the past year, avoiding lattice signatures and related zero-knowledge structures, prioritizing hashing wherever possible, including Winternitz one-time signatures and SPHINCS-type schemes. Drake connected this discussion to recent AI mathematical outputs, stating that elliptic curves contain algebraic structures like Schoof, Frobenius, and pairings that can be exploited, while hashing is deliberately designed to minimize structure.

This is a re-pricing of security assumptions driven by events, not an immediate sell-off directive. Addresses that have exposed public keys, protocols that have staked on lattice after quantum migration, and projects relying on FHE for on-chain privacy computations are under pressure; hash signatures, conservative parameter lattice implementations, and infrastructure for off-chain encrypted data transmission are relatively beneficial. Funds will not immediately shift due to a single statement, but new deployments will shift the security budget from "lattice is quantum-resistant" to "hash priority, parameter amplification, and less public key exposure." If exchanges and custodians continue to reuse addresses, they are effectively shortening the remaining security window of ECDSA.

Source: Public Information