Overview
- On March 12, a user swapped $50.4 million of aEthUSDT to aEthAAVE via Aave’s CoW Swap widget and received about $36,000, with Aave saying the funds remain held and the trader has not contacted either team.
- The interface displayed a clear “High price impact (99.9%)” warning that the user manually accepted before execution.
- CoW Swap reports a legacy hardcoded gas ceiling and a winning solver’s on-chain execution failure, which led the trade into a SushiSwap AAVE/WETH pool with roughly $73,000 in liquidity.
- A suspected mempool leak exposed the transaction, enabling a sandwich attack that earned an MEV bot about $9.9 million, with Titan Builder reportedly extracting around $34 million for guaranteed block ordering.
- CoW Swap says it has patched the gas-limit issue, and Aave is rolling out Aave Shield to block swaps with price impact above 25%, while investigations into the mempool exposure and value extraction continue.