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CoW Swap Points to Legacy Code and Solver Failures in $50M Loss That Aave Attributes to Illiquid Market

Market EventsSecurity & Incidents
March 16, 2026
1 min read
CoW Swap Points to Legacy Code and Solver Failures in $50M Loss That Aave Attributes to Illiquid Market

Aave and CoW Protocol published separate post-mortem reports over the weekend dissecting the March 12 swap that resulted in a trader converting $50.4 million in USDT into roughly $36,000 worth of AAVE tokens, widely considered the largest execution loss of its kind in decentralized finance (DeFi).

The two accounts largely agree on the basic sequence of events but diverge sharply in emphasis and tone, with Aave framing the loss as the predictable consequence of trading in an illiquid market and CoW Swap painting a more complex picture of compounding infrastructure failures that made the outcome dramatically worse than it needed to be.

'An Illiquid Market'

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RELATED TOPICS

aavecow protocoldeFi lossswap failureliquidity risklarge tradereport analysistrading lossDeFi risk

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