What happens when you ignore drift? A businessman was found in exchange for $50 million

Despite the obvious warnings, one trader confirmed a large exchange of $50M and acquired 324 Aave tokens.

A user tried to buy $50 million worth of AAVE tokens on Tether through the Aave interface on March 12, but the trade went through after the user received a warning about high slippage.

According to Aave Labs founder and CEO Stany Kulekov, the transaction consists of a single order of large size placed through the Aave interface, which integrates the routing infrastructure provided by CoW Swap. Due to an unusually large order size, the interface displayed a warning about abnormal drift and required clear confirmation before the swap could proceed.

A $50M business gone wrong.

The warning appeared as a confirmation box, which the user had to manually accept before completing the transaction. According to Kulekov, the user verified the warning on a mobile device and chose to continue trading despite the swipe ad. Due to performance conditions and the liquidity of the routing channel, the user ultimately received only 324 AAVE tokens for the $50 million USDT order.

According to Kulekov, the transaction could not proceed without the user accepting the warning and confirming that he accepted the associated risks through the interface. He said the routing infrastructure works as designed and the integration with CoW Swap follows standard practices commonly used in the DeFi sector.

However, the final performance was much worse than expected in a largely liquid market environment. Although Kulekov said that the volume of this particular transaction was much higher than what was seen on the site, users pointed out that events involving significant slippage in Defi could occur.

In response to the incident, the executive said that the Aave team sympathizes with the user and will try to establish a relationship with them. He added that the protocol plans to return nearly $600,000 in fees collected from the transaction. Kulekov said that while it is important to maintain the permissionless nature of DeFi, the industry still needs to build additional safeguards to help mitigate similar risks in the future.

User freedom vs protection

The CoW protocol, the DEX's aggregator, took to X and explained that “preventing users from trading removes choice and in some cases can lead to disastrous results.” Such tradeoffs show that “DeFi UX is still not where it needs to be to protect all users. As a team, we are now evaluating how to balance stronger protections with protecting user autonomy.”

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The platform said it will refund any fees sent to the CoW DAO.

The incident quickly sparked a reaction in the crypto community. Prominent crypto analyst Autism Capital described the event as “a time to learn about money.”

Meanwhile, another crypto analyst, KJ Crypto, questioned the motivation behind such a large acquisition attempt and raised questions on his Twitter account as to why anyone would want to acquire Aave, which is worth $50 million per transaction.