Crypto User Loses $50 Million in Single Aave Swap
A crypto user lost nearly $50 million in a single trade on Thursday after a token swap triggered extreme slippage, leaving only about $36,000 in value.
The wallet tried to swap $50.4 million aEthUSDT—Tether’s interest-bearing token on the Aave protocol—for aEthAAVE, a staked version of Aave governance tokens, via the CoW Protocol. Thin liquidity caused the trade to execute with over 99% slippage, with arbitrage traders quickly capturing most of the lost funds.
Blockchain security firm BlockSec reported that arbitrageurs earned more than $43 million in the same block, including $32.6 million for the block builder.
Aave founder Stani Kulechov said the interface displayed multiple slippage warnings, which the user manually accepted on mobile. “The transaction could not proceed without explicit risk acknowledgment,” he noted.
Aave plans to refund roughly $600,000 in fees to the user. This follows a separate $27 million liquidation on the platform earlier this week, possibly linked to wstETH pricing issues.
