A dealer who swapped $2.01 million price of Ether on a decentralized alternate has been left with simply $14,500 price of tokens after a router directed the order by way of a low-liquidity pool, permitting an Ethereum block builder to revenue massively from a same-block arbitrage commerce.
The dealer swapped 1,126.44 of Ether (ETH) however solely acquired 5,776 Lighter (LIT) tokens, in a “textbook case of same-block backrun extraction,” based on GoPlus Safety.
“This was an actual, extremely imbalanced backrunner arbitrage, not a traditional sandwich assault,” GoPlus Safety stated. Titan Builder was the largest beneficiary, strolling away with $1.8 million from the transaction, which passed off on Monday at 1:59 am UTC.
Supply: Lookonchain
The incident is a reminder of the dangers posed by maximal extractable worth (MEV) bots and liquidity routers on high of hackers and scammers, which proceed to run rampant within the crypto business.
Don’t signal DEX transactions blindly, dealer says
To cut back the danger of such incidents, crypto dealer Ruslan Khairullin stated merchants ought to learn the transaction route earlier than signing the transaction.
“That is what occurs while you clicked affirm quicker than you learn the route. Painful lesson to see in an actual time.”
Supply: Luke Cannon
How the sufferer misplaced $2M to a bot
The sufferer’s swap routed roughly 1,117 Ether right into a low-liquidity AVAIL/WETH pool on Uniswap v3, inflicting the commerce to execute at roughly 120 occasions larger than what AVAIL may later be bought for, GoPlus Safety stated.
After the dealer acquired practically 6.67 million AVAIL tokens at an inflated value, the router concerned, 0x router, bought a small quantity of externally sourced AVAIL into the identical pool to extract about 1,072 WETH earlier than paying out 1,018 ETH, price $1.8 million, to Titan as a builder reward.
The AVAIL was then swapped for $14,200 price of LIT tokens, marking a 99.3% loss.
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Cointelegraph reached out to Titan however didn’t obtain an instantaneous response.
Titan has now made $112.6 million in income from its block constructing companies this yr, knowledge from DefiLlama exhibits.
Titan’s largest day this yr got here in March when it extracted round $34 million in arbitrage revenue from a MEV bot incident on the CoW Protocol.
Month-to-month change in Titan’s income since February 2025. Supply: DefiLlama
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