Crypto User Loses $50 Million in Single Aave Token Swap
A crypto user lost nearly $50 million in one transaction on Thursday after executing a large token swap that triggered extreme slippage, leaving only about $36,000 in value.
Blockchain data shows the wallet attempted to swap $50.4 million aEthUSDT—an interest-bearing version of Tether (USDT) on the Aave protocol—for aEthAAVE, a staked version of Aave governance tokens, via the CoW Protocol. Due to thin liquidity in the pools, the trade executed with over 99% slippage, and arbitrage traders quickly captured the lost value.
Within the same block, arbitrageurs reportedly extracted more than $43 million, with $32.6 million going to the block builder responsible for ordering transactions, according to blockchain security firm BlockSec.
Aave founder Stani Kulechov explained that the user received multiple warnings about extreme slippage on the interface and manually confirmed the trade on a mobile device. “The transaction could not proceed without the user explicitly accepting the risk,” he said, noting the CoW Swap routers operated as intended.
Aave plans to contact the affected user and refund roughly $600,000 in transaction fees. The loss follows another major Aave event earlier this week, when about $27 million was liquidated, possibly linked to a temporary pricing issue with wstETH.
