Overview
- On March 12, a wallet swapped about $50.43 million in aEthUSDT via Aave’s interface through CoW Protocol and received roughly 324–327 AAVE, worth about $36,000.
- Aave and CoW state the transaction executed as the signed order after clear price-impact warnings were displayed and manually accepted on a mobile device, with no exploit detected.
- Aave engineers said the core issue was accepting an already unfavorable quote with ~99% price impact, as routing ultimately hit a SushiSwap pool with about $73,000 in liquidity.
- Automated arbitrage and MEV actors captured over $43 million from the execution path, with analyses showing Titan Builder retained tens of millions and a bot operator gained around $10 million.
- Aave plans to return roughly $600,000 in protocol fees and CoW says it will refund any fees, as both teams review interface guardrails; on-chain attribution of the trader remains unconfirmed.