At a glance

  • Israel extradited Alexander Block to the United States early on Thursday, 29 Oct, on charges that he took about $2.8 million from the Nomad bridge in August 2022, the State Attorney’s Office said.
  • He faces eight counts in the Northern District of California, covering computer offences, transferring stolen property and money laundering. He is presumed innocent.

Israel has extradited Alexander Block, an Israeli-Russian citizen formerly known as Alexander Gurevich, to the United States, where he is charged in the Nomad bridge hack, Israel’s State Attorney’s Office announced on Thursday.

Nomad was a bridge that let users lock assets on one blockchain and receive matching tokens on another. According to the US extradition request, Block found a way around the check that confirmed the original assets had been locked, and on 1 Aug 2022 withdrew about $2.8 million in tokens without supplying them, The Jerusalem Post reported.

US authorities allege he then converted the tokens into other cryptocurrencies and moved them between wallets to hide their source. His actions allegedly exposed the flaw to other users, who then emptied a Nomad wallet of more than $186 million, Ctech reported, citing the US case.

A few days afterwards he gave back part of the tokens and offered over Telegram to return the rest in exchange for a payment for reporting the flaw, according to Ctech. Talks broke down when he stopped responding, and Nomad then turned to US law enforcement, the report said.

US prosecutors indicted him in the Northern District of California in August 2023, and the US asked for his extradition in December 2024. Israeli police detained him in May 2025 at Ben Gurion Airport as he was about to fly to Russia. Shortly before, he had taken a new surname and obtained a passport under it, the Post reported.

Block argued that the transactions used functions available in Nomad’s automated system and that the public blockchain record undercut the money-laundering charge. The Supreme Court rejected both.

In its view, using a bug in the code can be unlawful intrusion even when the software technically let the action through, and a public ledger does not by itself show who controls a wallet. Court President Isaac Amit later refused a further hearing.

Context

It follows another US extradition this month. On 24 Oct, CryptoWatchDesk reported an extradition from the Netherlands in a $36.9 million scam-laundering case. The Nomad case is four years old; this week’s theft at Binance is far larger, with the Binance hack put at about $6.3 billion.

No US court date has been announced. The US Justice Department had not published a statement by 15:15 UTC on Friday.

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This article is for information only and is not investment advice.