Investor lost $50M in token swap on Aave, receiving only $36,000 worth of tokens. An unidentified investor attempted to exchange 50.43 million USDT for AAVE using the CoW Protocol aggregator and SushiSwap exchange. Ultimately, the investor received only 327 tokens valued at approximately $36,000. The effective purchase price was approximately $154,000 per coin, although the market rate at the time was around $114.
A MEV bot, which monitors pending transactions in the mempool, exploited the situation. It executed a classic “sandwich attack”: secured a flash loan of $29 million in WETH on the Morpho platform; purchased a large volume of AAVE on Bancor, driving up the asset’s price; allowed the victim’s transaction to proceed, purchasing tokens at the inflated price; sold its tokens on SushiSwap, gaining a profit of $9.9 million. Stani Kulechov stated that the protocol’s interface warned the investor of “critical slippage” due to the unusually large order. Despite this, the investor confirmed the transaction from a mobile device and agreed to the terms.
Earlier today, a user attempted to buy AAVE using $50M USDT through the Aave interface. Given the unusually large size of the single order, the Aave interface, like most trading interfaces, warned the user about extraordinary slippage and required confirmation via a checkbox. Kulechov emphasized that Aave will contact the user and reimburse them $600,000 in fees collected from the transaction. CoW DAO also noted that the user saw warnings about the near-total loss of funds but consciously approved the transaction.
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