One of Ncat's most useful and unique abilities is called connection brokering. A listening Ncat in broker mode accepts connections from multiple clients. Anything received from one of the clients is sent back out to all the others. In this way an Ncat broker acts like a network hub, broadcasting all traffic to everyone connected.

Activate broker mode with the --broker option, which must be combined with --listen. It wouldn't make sense for a client to be a broker. See the section called “File Transfer” for details on using brokering to transfer files through restrictive firewalls, and the section called “Chatting” for using brokering to set up multi-user chat rooms.