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The Kite Foundation shared on X on August 6 that it caught and shut down an attack on its KITE token running on Ethereum mainnet. It stated that no tokens were taken. For a project that spent early 2026 as one of the few new tokens climbing into the top 100, the incident is an unwelcome entry into a summer defined by hacks.
KITE now joins Boltz, AQUA, ZEUS, and a growing list of DeFi protocols that have been probed or drained over the past two weeks.
No coins lost, but the alarm came from mainnet
According to the foundation’s post on X, its security monitoring picked up unusual KITE transfer activity on Ethereum mainnet, flagged it, and shut the attack down before any tokens moved.
It wrote, “It was identified and contained immediately, and no tokens were lost.”
Kite AI has been running a live bug bounty on Sherlock since July 20, offering up to 10,000 USDC for reported flaws. The platform also had a CertiK security rating of 4.2 on its token page, a sign that the project had put audit infrastructure in place before this week’s alert.
How did Kite move from a top-100 debut to a two-thirds drawdown?
In February, Kite’s foundation stated that KITE had crossed a $363 million market cap with a $2 billion fully diluted valuation, which puts it inside the 100 largest cryptocurrencies.
A few weeks after that statement, KITE ranked 7th by 24-hour spot volume on Upbit, South Korea’s largest exchange, with the KITE/KRW pair making up roughly 2.3% to 2.5% of the venue’s trading.
However, that position has changed since then, as KITE now trades around $0.104, with a market cap of over $187 million, per CoinMarketCap data.
This is a decline of over 67% from its March 6 all-time high of $0.3212 and currently ranks as number 123 on the list of largest cryptocurrencies.
Its trading volume went up by nearly 195% over 24 hours to around $60 million as the news circulated. The token has held up better than many peers through a soft market, but it is no longer the top-100 name it was in February.
Have there been similar attacks recently, and how did the attackers move?
Non-custodial Bitcoin bridge Boltz had to suspend swaps on August 3 after it discovered that AI-assisted attackers were iterating on vulnerabilities at a pace that was faster than its team could patch them.
The attacks spread to other Lightning providers, as AQUA Wallet flagged swap disruptions on its platform the same day. On August 5, Lightning wallet provider ZEUS took its infrastructure offline for a security audit. All three platforms said that customer funds were safe.
DefiLlama’s hacks database puts the total value stolen across crypto at around $16.9 billion. It also lists a $115 million Coldcard-related loss on July 31 among a run of late-July exploits.
Sharing his take on the attack that hit Boltz, Yan Pritzker, the cofounder and CTO of Swan, wrote on X, “This is a sad day. AI attackers are getting more and more sophisticated and small teams are going to have a tough time keeping up with the attacks.”
He added that the cost of maintaining enterprise security in the age of LLMs will price out many innovative startups who want to work on client funds.
a16z Crypto found that an off-the-shelf AI agent’s success rate at exploiting known vulnerabilities went up seven times from 10% to 70% once it was fed structured attack knowledge.
Kite says it is the first AI payment blockchain infrastructure designed to allow autonomous AI agents to transact with verifiable identity, programmable governance, and native stablecoin access.
With more AI attacks hitting platforms, including those focused on the agentic economy whose entire premise lies on machines moving money without a human in the loop, Kite’s response and containment will go a long way in restoring confidence.
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