Dragonfly’s Qureshi Torches ‘Bunker Mode,’ Pushes AI-Era Recovery Switch

Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi rejected Ethereum researcher Justin Drake’s “bunker mode” warning, calling it “cryptographic doomerism,” and urged proactive blockchain safeguards if artificial intelligence ever breaks cryptographic signatures. Qureshi made the comments in an X post on Thursday.

Qureshi: ‘Bunker mode’ won’t save a hacked market

Qureshi argued that migrating tokens to fresh addresses is not a real solution if signatures are broken. He said the approach would only protect coins as long as they remain unmoved and warned they would be “worthless if all of the other coins are being hacked and mass-sold.”

Drake: ECDSA could crack “in months, not years”

On Wednesday, Drake warned that rapid AI advances could break the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) that secures wallets sooner than expected, writing on X: “It is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case, in months, not years,” citing a Tuesday OpenAI report on AI progress in mathematics. Drake advised gradually migrating funds to fresh wallets where public keys are not exposed.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the industry should take risks from “AI-accelerated math seriously,” while adding he does not recommend rushing to move funds to fresh wallets.

Glassnode: 6.26M BTC sit in vulnerable addresses

Glassnode data cited by co-founder Rafael Schultze-Kraft on Thursday indicated that more than 31% of the Bitcoin supply—6.26 million BTC—currently reside in vulnerable addresses. Of that, about 4.33 million BTC are exposed due to address reuse, an issue that would be resolved by moving those coins to fresh addresses, according to Schultze-Kraft. Another 1.94 million BTC are exposed through their address format, he wrote.

Schultze-Kraft added that nearly 1.8 million BTC of the exposed total are held on cryptocurrency exchanges, with 57% of all exchange balances currently exposed.

Proposed fix: ‘Cryptographic Recovery Mode’

As an alternative to “bunker mode,” Qureshi proposed a “Cryptographic Recovery Mode,” described as a hash-based backup signature plan that users could map to their addresses. He said this would enable validators to force recovery if standard cryptographic signatures were broken.

All claims above are attributed to posts on X by the named parties.