Israel handed Alexander Block, who went by Alexander Gurevich until 2025, to U.S. authorities early Thursday, the State Attorney’s Office said. The U.S. accuses him of exploiting a flaw in the Nomad crypto bridge in August 2022 to take more than $2.8 million in tokens.
He was arrested in May 2025 at Ben-Gurion Airport, where he was about to board a flight to Russia, having recently changed his surname and obtained a passport under it. The Jerusalem District Court found him extraditable that July, and a Supreme Court panel upheld the ruling on March 8, 2026. Isaac Amit, the court’s president, later turned down his bid for another hearing, the State Attorney’s Office said.
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What the U.S. Alleges
An eight-count indictment was filed against Block on Aug. 16, 2023, in federal court in the Northern District of California: three counts of money laundering, four of computer fraud and one of transporting stolen property, the Supreme Court’s judgment shows. The U.S. sought his extradition on Dec. 10, 2024.
Nomad’s smart contracts were meant to confirm, through a function called proveAndProcess(), that a user had locked crypto on one chain before issuing matching tokens on another. The request says a June 2022 update let users route withdrawals through a different function, process(), which skipped that check.
Block allegedly tested the gap six times, depositing funds into Nomad’s wallet as he did so to keep it from being noticed. Around Aug. 1, 2022, he made four withdrawals worth more than $2.8 million, then spread the tokens across several addresses and swapped them into other coins to mask where they came from, the request alleges.
Those withdrawals showed other users how the trick worked, and they drained more than $186 million in deposits from a Nomad wallet, the request says. Days later, Block allegedly sent back some tokens and, on Telegram, offered a senior Nomad official the rest in return for a payment for reporting the bug. Negotiations started, but he went silent, and Nomad took the matter to U.S. authorities.
Block’s lawyers argued that he had only used the contracts as written and was not accused of altering their code. Justice Ofer Grosskopf, writing for the court, rejected that: exploiting a flaw in a smart contract is no different from exploiting one in any other program, much as a manufacturing defect that lets an ATM pay out cash for a sheet of paper does not make taking the money any less criminal. The court also rejected his claim that public blockchain records rule out money laundering, noting that they show wallets but not who controls them.
Block has not been convicted. No date for a U.S. court appearance had been made public as of Friday.
Unchained’s Read
The Nomad free-for-all, in which many wallets copied the same exploit, led Unchained to ask in 2022 whether that kind of mass looting would change how law enforcement handles DeFi hacks. For one alleged participant, Israel’s Supreme Court has now given part of the answer: a bug that lets anyone withdraw funds does not, in the court’s reading of Israeli law, make taking them legal.
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