CoWSwap: Refunding transaction fees for users who lost over $50 million in slippage when buying AAVE

Mars Finance News, March 13 — CoWSwap has issued an official response regarding “a user losing over $50 million due to slippage when buying AAVE”: Earlier today, a trader attempted to exchange 50 million aEthUSDT for aEthAAVE through Aave’s swap interface (supported by CoW Protocol). Despite clear warnings indicating that the user would lose nearly all trading value and the requirement to explicitly opt-in after seeing the warning, the user chose to proceed with the swap. It should be noted that CoW Protocol is a decentralized trading platform aggregator that routes trades through almost all major public and private liquidity sources. No DEX, DEX aggregator, public liquidity pool, or private liquidity pool (or their combinations) can execute this trade at a near-reasonable price. Preventing users from trading would deprive them of their choice and could lead to serious consequences in some cases (such as market crashes). That said, such transactions highlight that DeFi user experience still falls short of protecting all users. As a team, we are re-evaluating how to balance strong safeguards with maintaining user autonomy. We will also refund any fees paid to CoW DAO for this transaction.