AI Could Crack Crypto Wallets Within Months

Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake has warned of the risk of AI cracking crypto wallets in the coming months. The expert urged the industry to prepare in advance for a scenario where AI learns to recover private keys from public ones.

This is not about years, but several months. The threat refers to the possibility of obtaining a private key in about a week on a large GPU cluster.

The main risk involves addresses that have already signed transactions and revealed their public key. Large holders are advised to transfer funds to new addresses never used for signing.

After each outgoing transaction, it is best to move the remainder to a fresh address. This does not require new wallets — an address can be generated from the same seed phrase.

• Binance
• Bitbank
• Robinhood
• Bitfinex
• Tether

These platforms are among the major players that should already strengthen cold wallet protection.

There is another risk: the emergence of a classical analogue of Shor's algorithm capable of breaking elliptic curve cryptography and RSA without using a quantum computer.

No confirmed method for such hacking exists yet. Drake urges not to panic but to accelerate the transition to hash-based cryptography.