Headline: $2M Ether Swap Collapses to $14K After Router Routes Through Tiny Pool — Same-Block Backrun Drains the Trade
A single decentralized-exchange swap that started with about 1,126 ETH (roughly $2.01 million) ended with the trader receiving just 5,775 LIT tokens worth about $14,500 — after a routing mistake pushed the order through a near-empty AVAIL/WETH pool and a same-block backrun extracted almost the entire value.
What happened
- Blockchain security firm GoPlus Security says this was not a conventional sandwich attack but a “textbook case of same-block backrun extraction.”
- According to on-chain data shared by GoPlus, the trader routed a large wrapped-ETH amount into a thin AVAIL/WETH pool, buying AVAIL at a wildly inflated price.
- GoPlus’s transaction trace shows 1,116.8661 ETH was swapped for about 6.68 million AVAIL on Uniswap V3. Those AVAIL were then converted to ~14,508 USDC and finally into 5,775.66 LIT tokens on Uniswap V4 — the final on-chain outcome valued at roughly $14.5K.
- Within the same Ethereum block, a searcher spotted the distorted price and executed an arbitrage: spending only ~0.3942 WETH to buy 2,154 AVAIL from another source, then selling into the inflated AVAIL/WETH pool. That small, correctly priced sell pulled out the bulk of the newly added ETH.
- GoPlus says the backrun extracted about 1,072.46 WETH from the pool; 1,018.25 ETH of that was sent to Titan Builder as a builder payment. Titan Builder captured the largest share of value from the incident but did not take funds directly from the victim’s wallet.
How the mechanics broke the trade
- Routing a huge order through a low-liquidity pool created a massive price imbalance: the victim effectively bought AVAIL at roughly 120x the post-arbitrage market price.
- Because the inflated pool only needed a small, correctly priced counter-trade to rebalance, the arbitrage bot could withdraw almost all the newly added ETH by selling a relatively tiny amount of AVAIL into the warped pool — turning a multi-million-dollar swap into a near-total loss for the originator.
Advice and wider context
- Trader and crypto commentator Ruslan Khairullin warned this is a reminder to inspect the execution route of DEX transactions — not just the displayed output amount — before approving them. A poorly chosen route or blindly hitting “confirm” can be catastrophic.
- The incident also highlights how powerful searchers and block builders have become. DefiLlama data cited in coverage shows Titan Builder has generated about $112.6 million in block-building revenue so far this year; its biggest single-day windfall came in March, when it captured roughly $34 million from an MEV event involving CoW Protocol.
Bottom line
This episode underscores two persistent DeFi risks: low-liquidity pools that can be exploited by same-block searchers, and the importance of checking routing paths and slippage protection before confirming large swaps. In the current MEV environment, even a single routing mistake can turn a seven-figure trade into pocket change.
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