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’s 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 Depletion Causes Disaster

On-chain data shows that this whale used the Aave interface to attempt to swap up to $50.43 million worth of aEthUSDT for aEthAAVE. The critical issue was that the liquidity pool was extremely depleted, causing the transaction to trigger an astonishing over 99% slippage (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, in the world of decentralized finance (DeFi), such large losses caused by slippage are not uncommon. When traders try to execute massive orders in liquidity pools with shallow liquidity, it can cause severe price distortion. In such cases, automatic arbitrage systems quickly step in to profit from the price discrepancies caused by the trade.

Aave Founder: The System Issued a Slippage Warning Long Ago

Regarding this incident, Stani Kulechov, founder and CEO of Aave Labs, posted on social platform X to recount what happened:

Earlier today, a user attempted to buy AAVE tokens with $50 million USDT via 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 confirm and proceeded with the swap, accepting the high slippage, and received only 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 swaps, our interface issues a clear ‘price impact’ warning. The team is still investigating the details and will disclose any new developments.”