A trader who swapped $2.01 million worth of Ether on a decentralized exchange has been left with just $14,500 worth of tokens after a router directed the order through a low-liquidity pool, allowing an Ethereum block builder to profit massively from a same-block arbitrage trade.
The trader swapped 1,126.44 of Ether ($ETH) but only received 5,776 Lighter ($LIT) tokens, in a “textbook case of same-block backrun extraction,” according to GoPlus Security.
“This was a real, highly imbalanced backrunner arbitrage, not a classic sandwich attack,” GoPlus Security said. Titan Builder was the biggest beneficiary, walking away with $1.8 million from the transaction, which took place on Monday at 1:59 am UTC.
Source: Lookonchain
The incident is a reminder of the risks posed by maximal extractable value (MEV) bots and liquidity routers on top of hackers and scammers, which continue to run rampant in the crypto industry.
Don’t sign DEX transactions blindly, trader says
To reduce the risk of such incidents, crypto trader Ruslan Khairullin said traders should read the transaction route before signing the transaction.
“This is what happens when you clicked confirm faster than you read the route. Painful lesson to see in a real time.”
Source: Luke Cannon
How the victim lost $2M to a bot
The victim’s swap routed approximately 1,117 Ether into a low-liquidity AVAIL/WETH pool on Uniswap v3, causing the trade to execute at roughly 120 times higher than what AVAIL could later be sold for, GoPlus Security said.
After the trader received nearly 6.67 million AVAIL tokens at an inflated price, the router involved, 0x router, sold a small amount of externally sourced AVAIL into the same pool to extract about 1,072 WETH before paying out 1,018 $ETH, worth $1.8 million, to Titan as a builder reward.
The AVAIL was then swapped for $14,200 worth of $LIT tokens, marking a 99.3% loss.
Related: ‘All DeFi unsafe’ claim sparks AI security debate after April hack surge
Cointelegraph reached out to Titan but didn’t receive an immediate response.
Titan has now made $112.6 million in revenue from its block building services this year, data from DefiLlama shows.
Titan’s biggest day this year came in March when it extracted around $34 million in arbitrage profit from a MEV bot incident on the CoW Protocol.
Monthly change in Titan’s revenue since February 2025. Source: DefiLlama