System Warnings Useless! "99% Slippage" Still Determined to Swap, Whale Suffers Massive $50 Million Loss

In the crypto world, if someone suddenly loses tens of millions of dollars, it is usually due to a hacker attack or exploitation of vulnerabilities. However, early this morning (13th), a shocking incident occurred: a “whale” attempted to exchange tokens, and despite the system issuing a fail-safe warning, they still insisted on authorizing the transaction, which ultimately triggered extreme slippage, resulting in a loss of $50 million in an instant. Liquidity Exhaustion Causes the Disaster On-chain data shows that the whale tried to exchange up to $50.43 million worth of aEthUSDT for aEthAAVE via the Aave interface. The critical issue was that, due to the “extreme depletion of liquidity” in the trading pool, this transaction triggered an astonishing “slippage” of over 99% (the difference between the expected price and the execution price). After the transaction, the user only received about 324 aEthAAVE tokens, worth just $36,000. The huge difference of $50 million was instantly snatched up by arbitrage traders and network intermediary nodes (such as MEV bots). In fact, such tragedies caused by slippage leading to massive losses are not uncommon in the decentralized finance (DeFi) world. When traders attempt to force large orders into liquidity pools with very shallow liquidity, it causes severe price distortion. In these cases, automatic arbitrage systems quickly step in to profit from the price discrepancies caused by the trade. Aave Founder: The System Had Already Issued a Slippage Warning Regarding this incident, Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of Aave Labs, posted on social platform X to recount the details:

Earlier today, a user attempted to buy AAVE tokens with $50 million USDT through the Aave interface. Considering the extremely large size of this single order, the Aave interface, like most trading platforms, issued a strong warning about “abnormal slippage” and required the user to check a confirmation box before proceeding.

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.…

— Stani.eth (@StaniKulechov) March 12, 2026

Unfortunately, the user ultimately pressed the confirm button and continued with the exchange, accepting the high slippage, and only received about 324 AAVE tokens.

CoW Swap: No Vulnerabilities or Malicious Activity Detected CoW Swap, which is deeply integrated with Aave, also issued a statement emphasizing: “Based on the current information, this incident was not caused by any protocol vulnerability or malicious attack. The transaction was executed strictly according to the order parameters signed by the user.” CoW Swap further explained: “For such large-scale exchanges, our interface issues a clear ‘price impact’ warning. The team is still investigating the details and will publish any new developments.”