On a recent transaction, a wallet attempted to move a $50 M position within Aave and ended up receiving only 327 AAVE, about $36,000.

How the trade unfolded

The user held $50.4 M in aEthUSDT and tried to convert it to aEthAAVE through Aave’s interface, which now routes via CoW Swap.

The trade path routed $USDT → $WETH on Uniswap V3 and then $WETH → $AAVE through a small SushiSwap pool. That final pool reported just 17.65 WETH of liquidity while the transaction moved 17,957 WETH — over 1,000 times the pool’s depth.

Automatic market-maker mechanics emptied the pool and executed the trade at extreme rates, leaving the counterparty with ~327 AAVE instead of the expected ~250,000 tokens.

Who captured value

• MEV bots extracted approximately $12.5 M via arbitrage.
• Titan Builder — the block builder with priority — realized about $34.3 M in total, net of bot payments.
• Lido, as block proposer, received roughly $1.2 M.
• Liquidity providers in the SushiSwap pool earned about $3.5 M as passive beneficiaries.
• The affected whale was left with 327 AAVE, ≈ $36,000 in value.

Protocol changes and missing safeguards

In December 2025, Aave Labs replaced ParaSwap with CoW Swap in the front-end integration and redirected swap fees to Aave Labs rather than the DAO treasury, estimated at about $10 M per year.

During the migration, maximum slippage limits of 30% from the previous interface were not transferred. As a result, the UI only displayed warnings and awaited user confirmation without enforcing the prior protection.

Independent tooling such as DefiLlama blocked the same trade path, preventing execution from its interface.

Related incidents and remediation

Two days earlier an oracle labeled CAPO reported a lower wstETH price by ~2.85%, triggering liquidations of about $26 M across 34 accounts.

Aave and Titan Builder announced plans to reimburse some costs, offering to return at least $600 000 in fees.

Practical advice for users

Users are advised to avoid routing very large swaps through native front ends without verifying the final pool liquidity and path details. Aggregators and manual checks reduce exposure to routing and liquidity misconfigurations.

"Just use DefiLlama"