So, a trader managed to lose over $50 million while swapping aEthUSDT for aEthAAVE on a DEX using their phone. Yeah, you heard me right, $50 million in mobile wallets. This guy even got alerts about high slippage fees but decided to ignore them. Not sure if he entered that amount by mistake or just clicked "max" without thinking.
The whole swapping thing behind the scenes can get pretty tricky when you’re dealing with that kind of cash: check out the transaction history if you're curious.
There’s also this article that talks about a whale exchanging $50 million in stablecoins for just about $36,000 worth of aave, which might explain why the slippage alerts aren’t super reliable.
This is the weakness of current swap router contract, their routing is so confusing and there is no way to determine the real output we gonna get and instead we're only getting minOut or max slippage as a guardrail.
There are simply tons of ways we can lose our money using these dex from malicious delegation, unlimited approval, fake token, low liquidity, to getting front ran by a freaking mev bots .
This is why i believe DEFI is still immature. There is still so many loopholes that make the executors lost their money. It gets worsen with how the money is not refundable, and aave is only giving back 600k fees to the swapper. So i guess defi is not yet ready for the mass adoption.
This tech has so many loopholes and it never gets solved. No doubt that many doubting about defi's capability to handle mass adoption once they can't even solve this mev garbage problems.
There should be a function that prevent this kind of thing to happen. At least, when the liq is not able to fulfill requested amount to swap. It should be cancelded.
This is one of the problems with "decentralized" services: the expected trade price cannot be predicted during periods of high market volatility or low liquidity. even if the pool's liquidity increases, it is difficult for small services to handle sums like $50 million, which might be better handled through centralized services. It is also difficult to ensure that $50 million is always readily available as liquidity.
The fault lies entirely with the user.
It is not a technical problem, but it is impossible to continue providing liquidity and imposing low trading fees. Liquidity providers will not make profits from such low fees.
And funnily enough, the cowSwap exchange solver model is considered the most advanced system currently adopted by many DEXs. I wouldn't say the protocol hasn't undergone extensive testing, but they haven't done so until they exceed a certain amount, say $50 million per execution. https://etherscan.io/tx/0x9fa9feab3c1989a33424728c23e6de07a40a26a98ff7ff5139f3492ce430801f
It's scary to see $50M+ become around $36K+, I can't imagine what it would be like if I were that user. Sometimes our enemy isn't external parties like hacker or something like that, but ourselves, something like this doesn't happen just once, it happens repeatedly with different cases with the same source of the problem, human error.
Yes & one of them is those who are liquidity providers.
Yep, CowSwap literally become popular after solving the mev bots problem, but I heard the problem is on the thin liquidity on the AAVE pool.
The output number in their swap interface should carry weight, it should be more than just a display or estimation but should be the result of the swap simulation.
It's due technical problem too. If you wanna see the break down, then here you go.
Beside that if the fees was high, there would be none would use swap there. Low fees was the thing that people are looking for these days. When a defi has low fees combined with low slippage, this has enough to attract demand.