Ledger's chief technology officer, Charles Guillemet, has dismissed recent warnings that artificial intelligence could soon break the cryptographic signatures underpinning bitcoin and much of the internet, calling the alarm disproportionate to the evidence currently available.
Guillemet made his case in a post on X on October 9, 2026, responding to concerns raised two days earlier by Ethereum researcher Justin Drake, who had recommended entering what he called "bunker mode." Drake estimated that a superintelligence could break cryptographic signatures within months, pointing to recent developments at OpenAI as justification. Vitalik Buterin partially endorsed the concern the following day, suggesting AI could threaten the security of mathematical lattices within two years, while urging developers to prioritise hash-based schemes without rushing to move funds.
Guillemet rejected the premise outright. He said there is no evidence of a short-term technological breakthrough capable of breaking ECDSA, the elliptic curve signature scheme used across bitcoin and much of the wider digital economy.
A wider collapse, not a narrow one
The Ledger executive argued that framing this as a crypto-specific risk misses the scale of what a genuine break of asymmetric cryptography would mean. If ECDSA fell, he said, protocols such as TLS would fail alongside it, compromising banking systems, communications networks and critical infrastructure far beyond digital asset markets.
He illustrated the point with a comparison: worrying about bitcoin security in such a scenario, he said, would be like protecting a wifi password while the house burns down. The implication being that a cryptographic collapse of the kind Drake and Buterin describe would represent a systemic event well outside the boundaries of the crypto industry alone.
Theoretical math, not imminent threat
Guillemet did not deny that mathematical research has advanced. He acknowledged recent results on integer multiplication that surpassed the long-standing n.log n barrier, with an exponent improvement in the order of 2^-182. But he characterised this progress as purely theoretical, the kind of incremental advance that circulates in academic papers long before it has any bearing on real-world cryptographic systems.
He also pushed back on the standard being applied to ECDSA itself, arguing that demanding infallible cryptographic schemes is an unreasonable bar. By that logic, he said, nothing in computing could ever be considered safe, including the hash-based systems that Buterin has suggested as an alternative.
Guillemet's recommendation was for continued vigilance rather than either complacency or panic. Market participants, he said, should keep monitoring ongoing cryptographic research and take genuine risks seriously, but without confusing early-stage mathematical progress made in laboratories with an imminent security apocalypse for bitcoin or the broader internet.
The exchange underscores a growing divide within the industry over how seriously to treat AI-driven threats to existing cryptographic standards, with Ethereum-aligned researchers urging early preparation and Ledger's leadership counselling against overreaction to results that remain confined to academic settings.
