On 12 March 2026 a user confirmed a swap that began with roughly fifty million dollars of USDT-side value inside Aave and ended with a few hundred aEthAAVE worth tens of thousands. There was no reported protocol exploit. The wallet owner approved the path.
According to public breakdowns echoed by Aave founder Stani Kulechov and by CoW Protocol, the interface warned about extreme slippage and required an extra checkbox — on a mobile device. Technically, aEthUSDT was burned to withdraw USDT, routed through Uniswap V3 into WETH, then into a SushiSwap AAVE pool with liquidity measured in tens of thousands of dollars. A fifty-million order into that puddle is not a “bad fill”; it is a donation to price impact and MEV searchers.
The lesson is blunt. DeFi UIs will let you sign catastrophic trades if you override their warnings. Size the pool before the wallet, prefer limit-style intents, and never treat a green checkbox as a safety certificate. If you already signed something like this, document the transaction hashes and talk to professionals — not to Telegram “recovery” desks.
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This article is for general information only. It is not legal or financial advice. Details change. If you have lost money, contact your bank or card issuer and use the routes on the help pages.