An Ethereum trader appears to have executed a catastrophic on-chain swap, exchanging roughly $50 million worth of assets for only about $36,000 in AAVE tokens in a single transaction.
Blockchain data from Etherscan shows the wallet burned approximately 50.43 million aEthUSDT to withdraw an equivalent amount of USDT before routing the funds through a trade executed via CoW Protocol.
Instead of receiving an equivalent value of tokens, the transaction delivered only about 327 AAVE tokens, valued at roughly $36,000 at the time of the swap.
Analysts suggest the trade may have routed through an illiquid or manipulated pool, or involved a misconfigured order or routing error within the complex decentralised finance transaction path.
Another possibility is that the automated route aggregator selected an unfavorable liquidity path, causing the trader to receive a fraction of the intended value.
Despite the scale of the apparent loss, the incident is unlikely to significantly affect the broader Aave market because the transaction resulted in only a small amount of AAVE tokens.