Crypto User Loses $50 Million in Single Aave Swap Amid Massive Slippage
A crypto user lost nearly $50 million in one transaction on Thursday after executing a large token swap that triggered extreme slippage, leaving roughly $36,000 in value.
The wallet attempted to swap $50.4 million aEthUSDT—an interest-bearing version of Tether on the Aave protocol—for aEthAAVE, a staked version of Aave governance tokens, using the CoW Protocol. Thin liquidity caused the trade to execute with over 99% slippage, with arbitrage traders capturing most of the lost funds.
According to blockchain security firm BlockSec, arbitrageurs extracted more than $43 million in the same block, including $32.6 million to the block builder responsible for ordering transactions.
Aave founder Stani Kulechov said the interface warned the user about extraordinary slippage, which was manually accepted on a mobile device. “The transaction could not proceed without explicit confirmation,” he noted, adding that the CoW Swap routers functioned correctly.
Aave plans to contact the user and refund roughly $600,000 in fees. The incident comes days after about $27 million was liquidated on Aave, possibly due to a temporary pricing issue with wstETH.
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