TL;DR
- The Kite Foundation detected and managed to contain an attack on its native token on the Ethereum mainnet; no loss of funds was reported.
- The token is currently trading around $0.104, reflecting a drop of more than 67% from its all-time high of $0.3212 recorded on March 6.
- This incident adds to a series of AI-assisted attacks that affected Boltz, AQUA Wallet, and ZEUS over the past two weeks.
The Kite Foundation announced via X that it detected and neutralized an attack targeting its KITE token on Ethereum mainnet. According to the official statement, security monitoring systems identified unusual activity in token transfers, which triggered alerts and halted the operation before any funds left the contracts. “It was identified and contained immediately, and no tokens were lost,” the foundation wrote.
The project had an audit infrastructure in place before the incident. Kite AI maintains an active bug bounty program on Sherlock since July 20, with rewards of up to $10,000 USDC for reporting vulnerabilities. Additionally, its CertiK page shows a security rating of 4.2, indicating that review measures were in place before this week’s alert.
We detected an attack targeting the Kite (KITE) token. It was identified and contained immediately, and no tokens were lost.
In the interest of transparency, here is what happened:
• Our security monitoring flagged unusual KITE token transfer activity on Ethereum mainnet.
•…— KITE Foundation (@KiteAIFDN) August 6, 2026
Kite: From Top 100 Debut to a 67% Drop
In February, the foundation reported that KITE had surpassed a market capitalization of $363 million with a fully diluted valuation of $2 billion, positioning itself among the 100 largest cryptocurrencies. Weeks later, the KITE/KRW pair came to represent between 2.3% and 2.5% of the volume traded on Upbit, South Korea’s largest exchange, where the token ranked seventh by 24-hour spot volume.
That momentum failed to hold over time. According to CoinMarketCap data, KITE is currently trading around $0.104, with a market capitalization of over $187 million, and holds position number 123 in the global ranking. Trading volume rose nearly 195% in 24 hours to approximately $60 million as the news spread.
The Rise of AI-Assisted Attacks Tests the Sector
The incident falls within a week of intense malicious activity. On August 3, the Bitcoin bridge Boltz suspended its operations after detecting that attackers assisted by artificial intelligence were iterating over vulnerabilities faster than its team could patch them. On the same day, AQUA Wallet reported disruptions in its swaps. On August 5, Lightning wallet provider ZEUS temporarily shut down its infrastructure to conduct a security audit. All three projects confirmed that user funds were safe.
Yan Pritzker, co-founder and CTO of Swan, warned that “AI attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated” and that small teams will struggle to keep pace. An analysis by a16z Crypto determined that the success rate of a standard AI agent in exploiting known vulnerabilities went from 10% to 70% when provided with structured knowledge about attacks. DefiLlama’s hacks database estimates that the total stolen in the crypto industry amounts to approximately $16.9 billion.
