The Catastrophic Swap Error in DeFi: Whale $ETH Lost Nearly 50 Million USD with Only About 36,000 USD Worth $AAVE
Recently, the cryptocurrency community has been abuzz with a shocking transaction $ETH , widely shared on platform X (Twitter) by the account @amit0xic. In the post, the user jokingly stated that “I messed everything up” after accidentally swapping 50 million USDT for only 36,000 USD AAVE. However, he quickly revealed that this was a true story of another investor, along with a transaction link on Etherscan. According to data from Etherscan, the transaction with hash 0x9fa9feab3c1989a33424728c23e6de07a40a26a98ff7ff5139f3492ce430801f was successfully executed on 12/03/2026 (about 7 hours before the time of checking). Specifically:
Sender address: 0x3980dAA7EaaD0B7e0C53cFc5c2760037270DA54D Main receiving address: CoW Protocol: GPv2Settlement (0x9008D19f58AAbD9eD0D60971565AA8510560ab41) Transferred value: 0 ETH (only gas fee approximately 0.0011 ETH ~ 2.33 USD) Main action: Burn and withdraw 50,432,688.41618 aEthUSDT (equivalent to ~50 million USD USDT) from the Aave protocol. Swap the entire amount of aEthUSDT through the CoW Protocol aggregator for only 327.241335505966487788 aEthAAVE (market value at the time of execution approximately 37,564 USD).
The transaction involved a complex chain of events: withdrawing collateral from Aave → swapping through CoW Protocol → routing through Uniswap V3 and SushiSwap to exchange USDT for AAVE → depositing back into Aave in the form of aEthAAVE. As a result, the user lost nearly all of the value (slippage up to over 99.9%), leaving only AAVE worth less than 36,000 USD.
This is considered a typical case of a “fat-finger” error or incorrectly setting slippage tolerance parameters in DeFi.
Recently, the cryptocurrency community has been abuzz with a shocking transaction $ETH , widely shared on platform X (Twitter) by the account @amit0xic. In the post, the user jokingly stated that “I messed everything up” after accidentally swapping 50 million USDT for only 36,000 USD AAVE. However, he quickly revealed that this was a true story of another investor, along with a transaction link on Etherscan. According to data from Etherscan, the transaction with hash 0x9fa9feab3c1989a33424728c23e6de07a40a26a98ff7ff5139f3492ce430801f was successfully executed on 12/03/2026 (about 7 hours before the time of checking). Specifically:
Sender address: 0x3980dAA7EaaD0B7e0C53cFc5c2760037270DA54D Main receiving address: CoW Protocol: GPv2Settlement (0x9008D19f58AAbD9eD0D60971565AA8510560ab41) Transferred value: 0 ETH (only gas fee approximately 0.0011 ETH ~ 2.33 USD) Main action: Burn and withdraw 50,432,688.41618 aEthUSDT (equivalent to ~50 million USD USDT) from the Aave protocol. Swap the entire amount of aEthUSDT through the CoW Protocol aggregator for only 327.241335505966487788 aEthAAVE (market value at the time of execution approximately 37,564 USD).
The transaction involved a complex chain of events: withdrawing collateral from Aave → swapping through CoW Protocol → routing through Uniswap V3 and SushiSwap to exchange USDT for AAVE → depositing back into Aave in the form of aEthAAVE. As a result, the user lost nearly all of the value (slippage up to over 99.9%), leaving only AAVE worth less than 36,000 USD.
This is considered a typical case of a “fat-finger” error or incorrectly setting slippage tolerance parameters in DeFi.