A crypto trader lost more than $50 million in Aave-wrapped USDT on March 12 after sending a single large order through the DeFi lending protocol’s swap interface and clearing a slippage warning on a mobile device.
Facts from Etherscan shows that the wallet exchanged $50.43 million aEthUSDT for 327.24 aEthAAVE via the CoW protocol in Ethereum block 24,643,151.
At the current AAVE price of $111.52, the returned tokens were worth approximately $36,100, giving an implied loss of approximately $49.96 million from the original order size.
The trade immediately attracted attention in the crypto markets due to its size and because it moved through one of the decentralized finance world’s largest platforms. Aave is the largest DeFi lending protocol with total cumulative lending of over $1 trillion.
Following the incident, Aave revealed plans to contact the affected user and return approximately $600,000 in fees collected for the transaction. CoW Protocol said it would also refund any fees sent to CoW DAO.
Who is the victim?
Blockchain analytics platform Lookonchain said the wallet behind the exchange could belong to Garrett Jin, a popular crypto trader known as the BitcoinOG1011short.
Lookonchain said on-chain tracing has identified 13 wallets that may belong to Jin. It said these wallets received USDC or USDT from Binance on February 16 and 20, then became active again on Thursday and moved funds to two new wallets.
One of those wallets, Lookonchain said, shared the same Binance deposit address as Garrett Jin.
The claim attracted a lot of attention because Jin has already been linked to other major, closely watched crypto transactions.
Last October, online sleuths tied him to a $735 million short position on Bitcoin, opened through Hyperliquid, shortly before President Donald Trump threatened additional tariffs on China.
The trade, which generated up to $200 million in profits, later fueled insider speculation as it arrived on the market just before a broader sell-off.
However, Jin dismissed that story, saying the capital belongs to customers. He added that his team manages nodes and provides internal insights, and that he has no connection to the Trump family.
At the time of writing, Jin had not confirmed any connection to the $50 million loss.
Ethereum intermediaries share the windfall
While the trader absorbed the loss, other participants in Ethereum’s execution chain captured the spread opened up by the order.
Emmet Gallic, an analyst at Arkham Intelligence, said a maximum extractable value, or MEV, arbitraged the transaction between Uniswap and SushiSwap pools.
In Ethereum markets, MEV refers to the profits made by automated traders when they react to price differences that arise during block execution.
Gallic said the bot paid Titan Builder 16,927 ETH, worth approximately $34.8 million. Titan Builder then paid 568 ETH, or approximately $1.2 million, to the Lido validator associated with the block proposal, leaving approximately 16,359 ETH, or approximately $33.6 million. The bot operator was left with approximately $10 million in profits.
As a result, Titan Builder generated the highest revenue among crypto platforms in the past 24 hours, according to DeFiLlama facts.
Aave and CoW say the user has been warned about the transaction
Meanwhile, DeFi protocols Aave and CoW have both defended their platforms in this loss, stating that the user received a clear warning before the order was executed.
Aave founder Stani Kulechov explained that the user had manually ignored a warning signal flagging unusually high slippage, and then continued with the swap on mobile.
According to him:
“The transaction could not proceed without the user explicitly accepting the risk via the confirmation box.”
He described the result as “clearly far from optimal” and said Aave’s team would review stronger safeguards for similar transactions.
CoW Protocol gave a similar story, while explain That:
“There is no evidence of a protocol exploit or other malicious behavior. The transaction was executed according to the parameters of the signed order.”
CoW also said that available public and private liquidity sources could not support a reasonable filling for an order of that size.
Their explanations emphasized execution conditions rather than software bugs. The route looked for available liquidity, found a path, and delivered the order across locations whose price adjusted as the size passed through.
The alert flow recorded the user’s approval before the transaction reached the market.
Improving the DeFi user experience
As a result, the episode has brought renewed attention to how DeFi interfaces handle over-ordering.
Suhail Kakar, director of developer relations at Polymarket, said the incident highlighted a gap in DeFi user protection rather than a failure of the underlying contracts.
He said Aave and CoW Swap executed the transaction as intended, but cautioned that a mobile confirmation flow should not stand between a user and a $49.9 million loss due to slippage.
Kakar added that wallets and front ends should more clearly show expected dollar losses and introduce stronger controls for over-ordering, including mechanisms that break large transactions into smaller ones.
In response, Kulechov said Aave would implement stronger safeguards to prevent recurrence, while CoW said the trading demonstrated the need to continue improving the DeFi user experience.
According to CoW:
“Preventing users from making trades takes away choice and can lead to terrible outcomes in some situations (e.g. a market crash). That said, trades like this show that DeFi UX is still not where it needs to be to protect all users. As a team, we are now looking at how we balance strong safeguards with preserving user autonomy.”