Rich by Coin

Aave and CoW Swap released drastically different post-incident analyses over the weekend regarding the $50 million DeFi transaction incident. On that day, a user used the CoW Swap widget on the Aave interface to exchange over $50 million worth of aEthUSDT for approximately $36,000 worth of aEthAAVE. Aave attributed the losses to illiquid markets, emphasizing that users had manually acknowledged 99.9% of price impact warnings and announced the deployment of the “Aave Shield” feature to block swaps with price impacts exceeding 25% by default. The CoW Swap revealed a more complex cascading failure: a rigid gas cap led to the rejection of better offers, the optimal solver winning two auctions but failing to execute, and transactions potentially leaking from the private mempool.

The initial best unverified offer could have returned approximately $5-6 million, but verification failed due to a hard-coded 12 million gas unit cap. CoW also revised the actual swap fee to $110,368. Neither report detailed the profiting MEV bots; on-chain data showed that block builder Titan Builder withdrew approximately $34 million in ETH, and another MEV bot profited approximately $9.9 million through a sandwich attack. Two reports reveal contrasting post-incident findings as a single on-chain swap exposes illiquid markets, gas constraints, and lucrative MEV profits.

The user executed the transaction by using the CoW Swap widget on the Aave interface to swap over $50 million of aEthUSDT for about $36,000 of aEthAAVE. Aave attributes the losses to illiquid markets, noting that users had acknowledged 99.9% of price impact warnings and that the “Aave Shield” feature would block swaps with price impacts exceeding 25% by default. CoW Swap’s analysis describes a cascading failure: a rigid gas cap led to the rejection of better offers, the optimal solver winning two auctions but failing to execute, and transactions potentially leaking from the private mempool. The initial best unverified offer could have returned roughly $5-6 million, but verification failed due to a hard-coded 12 million gas unit cap.

CoW also revised the actual swap fee to $110,368. Neither report detailed the profiting MEV bots. On-chain data shows Titan Builder withdrew approximately $34 million in ETH, and another MEV bot profited approximately $9.9 million through a sandwich attack. Two post-incident analyses published over the weekend present contrasting findings about a $50 million on-chain DeFi swap involving Aave and CoW Swap. The event occurred when a user used the CoW Swap widget on the Aave interface to exchange over $50 million worth of aEthUSDT for about $36,000 worth of aEthAAVE.

Aave attributes the losses to illiquid markets, noting that users acknowledged 99.9% of price-impact warnings and that the Aave Shield feature will block swaps with price impacts exceeding 25% by default. CoW Swap’s analysis describes a cascading failure: a rigid gas cap prevented better offers from being executed, the optimal solver won two auctions but failed to execute, and some transactions may have leaked from the private mempool. They also report that a hard-coded 12 million gas unit cap blocked verification of the initial best unverified offer, and they revised the actual swap fee to $110,368. On-chain data shows Titan Builder withdrew approximately $34 million in ETH, while another MEV bot earned about $9.9 million through a sandwich attack.