Aave's Shocking Slippage Incident!
On March 13, 2026, in the early morning, a user attempted to exchange approximately $50.43 million worth of aEthUSDT (the interest-bearing token for USDT deposited in Aave) for aEthAAVE through the Aave official interface. As a result, the order size far exceeded the liquidity, triggering an extreme price impact and >99% slippage, ultimately receiving only about 327 AAVE (worth approximately $36,000), instantly evaporating nearly $50.39 million!
Aave founder Stani Kulechov posted a response: The interface had repeatedly shown “extraordinary slippage” warnings and required users to check a box to confirm the risk. The user clearly accepted this on a mobile device before executing the transaction. The transaction was routed through CoW Swap and operated as designed, but the result was “clearly not ideal.”
Similar incidents are not uncommon in DeFi history. Between 2024 and 2025, multiple classic “sandwich attacks” + high slippage errors occurred on Uniswap: for instance, a user faced a significant swap due to high slippage tolerance + shallow pools, being precisely attacked by an MEV bot from both sides, resulting in a loss of about $700,000; another large memecoin pool transaction directly crashed the price, with slippage consuming hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, leaving only scraps.
These cases are analogous to Aave's incident: Code is Law executed ruthlessly, and users' one-click “confirm” is irreversible. No matter how prominent the warning, continuous clicking on the phone still leads to tragedy.
A moment's mistake can cause funds to instantly go to zero.