Crypto investor loses $50 million, left with just $36,000 after a single trading error.

Crypto User Loses $50 Million in Single Token Swap Amid Massive Slippage

A crypto user lost nearly $50 million in a single transaction on Thursday after executing a large token swap that triggered extreme slippage, leaving only about $36,000 in value.

Blockchain data shows the wallet attempted to swap $50,432,688 aEthUSDT—an interest-bearing version of Tether’s USDT on the Aave protocol—for aEthAAVE, a staked version of Aave governance tokens, via the CoW Protocol. Thin liquidity in the trading pools caused the swap to execute with more than 99% slippage, with the lost value quickly captured by arbitrage traders and intermediaries.

Within the same block, arbitrageurs reportedly extracted over $43 million in profit, according to blockchain security firm BlockSec. Of that, $32.6 million went to the block builder, the entity responsible for assembling and ordering transactions before block finalization.

Aave founder Stani Kulechov explained that the user received multiple slippage warnings via the interface and manually confirmed the transaction on a mobile device. “The interface warned the user about extraordinary slippage and required confirmation via a checkbox,” Kulechov said. He noted that the CoW Swap routers functioned correctly and industry standards were followed, but the result was “clearly far from optimal.”

Aave plans to contact the user and refund roughly $600,000 in transaction fees.

This incident follows another major loss on Aave earlier this week, when around $27 million was liquidated, possibly due to a temporary pricing issue with the token wstETH.