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DeFi Disaster: How Ignoring Slippage Warnings Cost One Trader $50 Million on Aave

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Brian Armstrong's Bold Prediction: AI Agents Will Soon Dominate Global Financial

TLDR

  • Extreme slippage on Aave led to a devastating loss of nearly $50 million for one cryptocurrency trader in a single swap transaction.
  • The transaction converted $50.4 million into approximately 327 AAVE tokens valued at just $36,000.
  • The trader acknowledged and bypassed several explicit slippage warnings on mobile before executing the trade.
  • An MEV bot executed a sandwich attack on the same transaction, extracting close to $10 million in profits.
  • The Aave protocol announced plans to refund approximately $600,000 in protocol fees to the impacted trader.

On Thursday, March 12, 2026, a cryptocurrency trader experienced one of the most devastating losses in DeFi history, losing approximately $50 million in just one transaction. The incident occurred while executing a token swap on Aave, a prominent decentralized finance platform.

The wallet in question, freshly funded via Binance, contained $50,432,688 worth of aEthUSDT. These interest-bearing tokens represent Tether’s USDT stablecoin deposited within the Aave lending ecosystem operating on Ethereum.

The trader initiated a swap to exchange the entire balance for aEthAAVE, the tokenized version of Aave’s governance token. This transaction was processed through CoW Protocol and executed on the SushiSwap decentralized exchange.

Due to the massive size of the order relative to available pool liquidity, the swap suffered catastrophic slippage exceeding 99%. The final result was a mere 327 AAVE tokens worth roughly $36,000.

Effectively, the trader paid approximately $154,000 for each AAVE token when the prevailing market rate stood at around $114.

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What the Warnings Said

Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave, verified that the platform’s user interface had displayed prominent warnings before execution. In a post on X, he explained that the system alerted the user about “extraordinary slippage” resulting from the “unusually large size of the single order.”

The platform mandated that users check a confirmation box acknowledging the risk. The trader completed this step on a mobile device and moved forward with the transaction.

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“The transaction could not be moved forward without the user explicitly accepting the risk,” Kulechov stated. He emphasized that the CoW Swap routing system functioned exactly as designed.

CoW DAO released its own statement, explaining that “no DEX, DEX aggregator, public liquidity pool, or private liquidity pool would have been able to fill this trade at anywhere near a reasonable price.”

The MEV Bot Attack

Compounding the slippage disaster, an MEV bot launched a sophisticated “sandwich attack” targeting this transaction.

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MEV bots constantly scan pending blockchain transactions for profitable opportunities. This particular bot identified the massive incoming AAVE purchase and positioned itself to exploit it.

The bot secured a flash loan of $29 million in wrapped Ether from Morpho, deployed it to purchase AAVE on Bancor (artificially inflating the price), then sold directly into the trader’s order on SushiSwap. This strategy generated approximately $9.9 million in profits for the bot operator.

The manipulation drove AAVE’s price significantly higher immediately before the trader’s order executed, amplifying an already catastrophic outcome.

This incident followed closely after approximately $27 million in liquidations on Aave, which some observers suggested might have been connected to a temporary pricing anomaly affecting the wstETH token.

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Kulechov expressed sympathy for the affected trader. The Aave protocol intends to contact the user and reimburse approximately $600,000 in fees collected during the transaction.

CoW DAO similarly committed to refunding any protocol fees associated with the trade.

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Crypto World

BlackRock Launches iShares Staked Ethereum Trust With 82% Rewards

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The new BlackRock Ethereum staking ETF has shaken the markets up, leading to ETH USD surging +2.8% on the back of the news

Investors have paid fees to hold Ethereum in ETFs for years while leaving the network’s native yield on the table, and that inefficiency disappeared this morning when BlackRock turned Ethereum into a productive asset for Wall Street by entering the staking race.

For the first time in US market history, the world’s largest asset manager is offering a product that captures both price appreciation and the network’s validator rewards. Now investors don’t have to choose between holding and earning, both are on the table.

This news comes as the Ethereum price surged +2.8% overnight and is currently trading back above $2,100 as we head into the weekend.

The total crypto market cap is also up, climbing +2% over the past 24 hours and reclaiming the crucial $2.5 trillion level in the process.

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The new BlackRock Ethereum staking ETF has shaken the markets up, leading to ETH USD surging +2.8% on the back of the news
SOURCE: CoinGecko

BlackRock Enters the Staking Race: ETHB Launches on Nasdaq

BlackRock officially launched the iShares Staked Ethereum Trust (ETHB) on the Nasdaq exchange today. The product is distinct from the firm’s existing iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA), which holds over $6.5Bn in assets but serves strictly as a passive price tracker.

This new vehicle intends to stake between 70% and 95% of its ether holdings to generate yield. However, the fee structure is aggressive. While the standard sponsor fee is set at 0.25%, BlackRock has implemented a promotional waiver that reduces the cost to 0.12%.

This rate applies to the first $2.5Bn in Net Asset Value (NAV) or for the first 12 months of trading, whichever threshold is breached first.

Jessica Tan, Head of Americas for iShares, positioned the launch as a direct response to client demand for products that reflect the full economic reality of the asset class.

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The trust joins a BlackRock digital asset platform that now oversees approximately $130Bn in assets, cementing the firm’s dominance in the digital asset ETF space.

DISCOVER: Next Crypto to Explode in 2026

The BlackRock Ethereum Institutional Pivot: Yield is No Longer Optional

This launch signals that institutional adoption has moved beyond simple exposure. Until recently, regulatory friction prevented US issuers from including staking mechanics in exchange-traded products, forcing investors to choose between the safety of an ETF and the yield of direct ownership. That choice is no longer binary.

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The arrival of ETHB suggests that regulators are increasingly comfortable with the technical nuances of proof-of-stake blockchains. Recent coordination between the SEC and CFTC has likely smoothed the path for these more complex structured products.

For allocators, the implications are mathematical: holding ample ETH without staking it is now a decision to accept underperformance relative to the benchmark.

Competitors like Fidelity and Grayscale are now on the defensive. With BlackRock successfully packaging staking rewards into a 0.12% fee product, the pressure to upgrade existing spot ETFs into staking-enabled vehicles will be immediate. The market standard for an Ethereum product has just been raised.

Supply Dynamics: The Scarcity Squeeze for ETH USD

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SOURCE: TradingView

The launch of ETHB introduces a new demand sink for the Ethereum network. Unlike spot ETFs, which simply hold coins in cold storage, staking ETFs lock those coins into the validator network. This reduces the actively circulating supply available for trading.

If capital rotates aggressively from the BlackRock Ethereum ETHA product to its new ETHB staking fund, or if new money enters specifically for the yield, the percentage of ETH locked in staking contracts will rise.

This aligns with broader market trends where Ethereum’s scarcity index is already turning positive. A successful ETHB launch accelerates this dynamic by institutionalizing the lock-up process.

With ETH USD facing immediate resistance at $2,150, the launch of BlackRock’s new Ethereum staking ETF could send it surging straight to the next target at around $2,400.

EXPLORE: Best Crypto Presales to Buy in 2026

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Vitalik Buterin Questions AI Strategy of Group He Funded

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Vitalik Buterin Questions AI Strategy of Group He Funded

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said Friday that he is no longer closely aligned with the Future of Life Institute, a group that received SHIB tokens from him in 2021. 

Buterin said the institute originally pitched him a broad roadmap for reducing existential risks, including those tied to artificial intelligence, biology and nuclear threats, along with wider pro-peace and pro-epistemics initiatives. He said that helped motivate the Shiba Inu (SHIB) donation.

Buterin said the institute later moved toward cultural and political advocacy around AI risks, an approach he described as materially different from the strategy outlined when he donated.

“My worry is that large-scale coordinated political action with big money pools is a thing that can easily lead to unintended outcomes, cause backlashes, and solve problems in a way that is both authoritarian and fragile, even if it was not originally intended that way,” he wrote.

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Buterin expresses disagreements to FLI’s current approach

The FLI describes its mission as reducing extreme risks and steering transformative technologies to benefit humanity.

“We need policies to help ensure that AI development improves lives everywhere – rather than merely boosts corporate profits,” the organization states on its website. 

Source: FLI

However, Buterin said some of the group’s proposals focus on placing safeguards in biosynthesis devices and AI models so that they refuse to produce harmful outputs.

“I view this as a very fragile solution: there are many ways to jailbreak, fine-tune or otherwise get around such restrictions,” he added. 

Cointelegraph reached out to the FLI for comments, but had not received a response by publication.

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Related: Vitalik says ‘at present’ his donations yield better gains than investments

FLI cashed out $500 million from the SHIB donation

In 2021, Buterin received large amounts of SHIB tokens and other dog-themed tokens as developers attempted to use his name as a marketing tactic. He later allocated some of those tokens to charitable causes.