Israel Extradites Nomad Bridge Hack Suspect Alexander Block to US

Alexander Block, the Israeli-Russian citizen accused of taking more than $2.8 million in tokens by exploiting a flaw in the Nomad crypto bridge, is in U.S. custody after Israel handed him over early on Thursday, Oct. 29, the State Attorney's Office said.

Block went by Alexander Gurevich until 2025. He has not been convicted. No U.S. court appearance date had been made public as of Friday.

The charges

A grand jury indictment filed Aug. 16, 2023 in the Northern District of California contains eight counts: three of money laundering, four of computer fraud and one of transporting stolen property. The U.S. requested extradition on Dec. 10, 2024.

Block was arrested in May 2025 at Ben-Gurion Airport as he was about to board a flight to Russia. He had changed his surname from Gurevich to Block and obtained a passport under the new name. The Jerusalem District Court found him extraditable in July 2025. A Supreme Court panel upheld that ruling on March 8, 2026, and court president Isaac Amit later rejected his request for a further hearing.

The alleged exploit

According to the U.S. extradition request, a June 2022 update to the Nomad bridge let users route withdrawals through a function called process(), skipping the proveAndProcess() verification check. Block allegedly tested the gap six times, then made four withdrawals worth more than $2.8 million around Aug. 1, 2022. He then allegedly spread the tokens across addresses and swapped them into other coins.

Other users copied the method and drained more than $186 million from a Nomad wallet, the request says. Block allegedly returned some tokens and offered a senior Nomad official the rest in exchange for a bug-reporting payment over Telegram, then stopped responding.

The court's reasoning

Block's lawyers argued he had only used the contracts as written and was not accused of altering their code, so there was no unlawful computer intrusion under Israeli law. They also argued that the public visibility of blockchain transactions undermined the claim that he tried to conceal the movement of funds.

Israel's Supreme Court rejected both arguments. Justice Ofer Grosskopf, writing for the court, held that exploiting a flaw in a smart contract is no different from exploiting a flaw in any other program. Public blockchain records show wallets but not who controls them, the court noted, so transparency does not rule out money laundering.

The State Attorney's Office said the extradition involved its International Department, the Israel Police operational coordination division and Interpol units.

What it means

The ruling found that using a smart contract as written does not, on its own, defeat a computer intrusion claim, at least for the purposes of extradition. Block's case, which centers on one participant who allegedly took $2.8 million of a drain exceeding $186 million, is now headed to a U.S. court.