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. Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase). Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets. IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By "break" I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster). Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture. In hindsight, May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot. Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time? Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.) Separately, as Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once. Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case. I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11's "risq list" (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I'll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026). Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from "Satoshi's shield", i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS. Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security. The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration.

Coming up for air now after a very dense excellent week in Seoul at KBW, while staying on top of our response to a security event affecting part of our infrastructure. I can now respond to queries and speculation regarding what is impacted and what is not affected. Based on our investigation to date, there is no indication that MetaMask wallets or customer funds in wallets have been affected. Your Secret Recovery Phrase, your keys, and the assets in your wallet were not part of this incident because they CANNOT be. You custody and control your own keys. That is how self custody works. You are fully in control of your own money in MetaMask. Like many providers in our industry, we constantly face attempted attacks from a range of threat actors and periodically encounter security issues. Our approach follows established best practice: we do not publicly discuss the details of an open incident, but we disclose promptly to partners and relevant stakeholders once an issue is sufficiently understood. In this case, we shared the relevant details with partners, agreed and implemented a response strategy together, and then disclosed publicly. As a precaution, we and our partners rotated validator keys. That step is operationally inconvenient which is regrettable as validators must exit the staking queue and then re-enter the queue to restake, which takes time. The validator staking architecture of Ethereum separates the key that proposes and attests from the key that can withdraw the stake. In accordance with the Ethereum principle of self-custody, we do not hold withdrawal keys for our clients. Because of that separation, an issue in the validator infrastructure CANNOT result in the improper movement of the underlying ETH. Rotating those keys was how we reduced residual operational risk. Self-custody and user control are a central design principle guiding how we build -- in MetaMask, in staking and validation, and across Ethereum more broadly. Self custody plus rigorous decentralization represents a paradigm shift in security. Increasingly, the world is waking up to the benefits of this sounder architecture.

📣 We’re excited to announce our partnership with @GoogleCloud. Google Cloud is joining as a key infrastructure partner powering @Puffer_Unifi