Ethereum researcher Justin Drake on Wednesday laid out how holders can protect their coins if AI cracks wallet security. His main step is moving funds to brand-new addresses that have never sent a transaction.
The move needs no new software or wallets. However, Drake said a break could come within months in the worst case, while warning that a rushed exodus would do more harm than good.
How Drake Says to Protect Your Coins
Drake recommends 4 steps, starting with the largest and most experienced holders.
- Move most funds to a never-used address.
An address that has never sent coins keeps its owner’s key hidden.
- Switch addresses after every spend.
Once coins leave an address, the rest should go to a fresh one. It can come from the same seed phrase, the backup word list that restores a wallet.
- Do not rush or panic.
Drake called the step simple and preventive, not an emergency.
- Know where you stand.
Wallets under 50 Bitcoin (BTC) have partial cover, he said, from about 20,000 early exposed addresses holding 50 BTC each.
“Don’t rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good,” he warned.
Why a Fresh Address Works as a Defense
Every crypto wallet has a private key, a secret code that approves payments, and a matching public key.
A never-used address shows only a scrambled fingerprint of the public key, called a hash. The full key appears on the blockchain, crypto’s public ledger, at the first spend.
Drake fears AI could help attackers work backward from a visible public key to the private one. He pointed to OpenAI’s release this week of 722 AI-written math papers.
None of the results he named deals with wallet math. No published research shows Bitcoin or Ethereum (ETH) cryptography has been broken.
Still, about 6.04 million BTC already sits behind visible keys, according to analytics firm Glassnode. BeInCrypto cited that figure earlier Wednesday in coverage of Europol’s quantum wallet warning.
Drake named Binance, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether as firms that could harden their offline reserve wallets. He also said Ethereum’s switch to standard SHA or BLAKE hash-based security must now speed up.
