Tracking the Mercado Bitcoin hacker here, $46M stolen and growing.
Lots of old deposit addresses are being swept by the hacker currently, while they sell off memecoins and altcoins.
So @binance got hacked causing $6B worth of assets to move out of their Hot Wallets (hacked amount ended up being around 3-4B due to frozen funds).
This is their balance history for all time. I circled the hack so you can see it on their all time balance history... doesn't look so bad when you zoom out.
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.
NEW: U.S. government-linked wallets moved about $103.2 million in seized crypto on Tuesday, sending 833.6 BTC ($71.6 million) to Coinbase Prime and 40,285 BNB ($31.6 million) to a fresh address, according to Onchain Lens.
The wallets still hold roughly $27.5 billion in crypto, including $27.2 billion in bitcoin. bitcoin:native binancecoin:native
Bitcoin linked to Bitminter founder (Geir Harald Hansen) just moved 829 $BTC.
Some of the BTC hasn't moved since 8 years ago.
Hansen built Bitminter, one of the earliest mining pools. At its peak, it accounted for close to 10% of the entire Bitcoin network, mining 208,232 BTC.
Yesterday 0x7143 dumped 20,036 ethereum:0xae7ab96520de3a18e5e111b5eaab095312d7fe84 for 20K $ETH in two trades at a ~0.18% discount.
Unstaking via Lido would've netted ~36 more ETH (~$97K), about a month of staking yield.
The 20K $ETH went straight to Bitget.
Who's rushing to get funds into a recently hacked exchange?
Security Update: We are responding to a security incident affecting part of our infrastructure.
At this time, we have identified no immediate threat to MetaMask wallets.
As a precaution, we are proactively exiting affected validators within our non-custodial staking operations, in coordination with clients, partners and security advisors.
We’ll share further updates as appropriate.
Yesterday 0x7143 dumped 20,036 ethereum:0xae7ab96520de3a18e5e111b5eaab095312d7fe84 for 20K $ETH in two trades at a ~0.18% discount.
Unstaking via Lido would've netted ~36 more ETH (~$97K), about a month of staking yield.
The 20K $ETH went straight to Bitget.
Who's rushing to get funds into a recently hacked exchange?
This OG has 33K BTC ($2.8B)
He's kept his BTC separated into 4.5K BTC addresses for the last 8 years and most of the bitcoin traces back to mining in 2010.
Diamond Hands.
Addresses linked to OFAC Sanctioned Lazarus Group (North Korea) have been actively moving $30M+ through Hyperliquid (HyperUnit) as recent as yesterday.
@zachxbt identified these addresses as Lazarus Group in 2024 linked to $61M in stolen funds
Bitcoin linked to Bitminter founder (Geir Harald Hansen) just moved 829 $BTC.
Some of the BTC hasn't moved since 8 years ago.
Hansen built Bitminter, one of the earliest mining pools. At its peak, it accounted for close to 10% of the entire Bitcoin network, mining 208,232 BTC.
Ionic Digital $IOND launched on the Nasdaq yesterday reaching a MC of almost $3B
The company was formed from the pieces of Bankrupt Celsius Estate
Still holding 2851 $BTC ($182M) and still mining today but they have reduced their mining compute to make space for AI compute