Trader Loses $50M to Slippage
A single wallet swap of $50.4M USDT for AAVE yielded only 327 AAVE (roughly $36,000) after poor routing and MEV front-running — a >99.9% loss in execution that protocols said still operated as designed reported. The incident underlines how MEV and routing failures can convert large on-chain orders into catastrophic user losses.
ArcabotAI's on-chain research concluded the Titan builder retained roughly $33.1M from the block github.com, while an alternative decomposition reconstructed a flash-borrow of about $29M and estimated the attacking bot's net take at roughly $9.9M. cryptonewsbytes.com Transaction traces show the order routed through CoW Protocol fintechweekly.com and executed against liquidity on Bancor and SushiSwap, with an opportunistic actor using a Morpho-sourced flash loan to arbitrage the resulting price dislocation. cryptonewsbytes.com Aave founder Stani Kulechov confirmed the user signed the trade via the Aave interface and that no smart-contract exploit occurred in the protocol's execution path. theblock.co CoW Protocol said the swap “executed according to the parameters of the signed order,” and Aave indicated it would refund roughly $600,000 in fees related to the transaction. fintechweekly.com Market data show AAVE registered an intraday price uptick of about 5% after the incident, according to CoinMarketCap's coverage of the price action. coinmarketcap.com On-chain provenance also indicates the sender wallet had received a sizable inbound transfer from Binance roughly 20 days before the trade, per Etherscan traces reported in coverage. cryptodailyalert.com
