Aave and CoW Swap released drastically different post-incident analyses of a $50 million DeFi trading incident.

PANews reported on March 16th that, according to The Block, Aave and CoW Swap released drastically different post-incident analyses over the weekend regarding the $50 million DeFi transaction incident. On that day, a user used the CoW Swap widget on the Aave interface to exchange over $50 million worth of aEthUSDT for approximately $36,000 worth of aEthAAVE.

Aave attributed the losses to "illiquid markets," emphasizing that users had manually acknowledged 99.9% of price impact warnings and announced the deployment of the "Aave Shield" feature to block swaps with price impacts exceeding 25% by default. The CoW Swap revealed a more complex cascading failure: a rigid gas cap led to the rejection of better offers, the optimal solver winning two auctions but failing to execute, and transactions potentially leaking from the private mempool. The initial best unverified offer could have returned approximately $5-6 million, but verification failed due to a hard-coded 12 million gas unit cap. CoW also revised the actual swap fee to $110,368. Neither report detailed the profiting MEV bots; on-chain data showed that block builder Titan Builder withdrew approximately $34 million in ETH, and another MEV bot profited approximately $9.9 million through a sandwich attack.